THE NEW MENTICULTURE 



t>^ 






HORACE FLETCHER'S WORKS 



THE A. B.-Z. OF OUR OWN NU- 
TRITION. 450 pp. Just issued. 

THE NEW MENTICULTURE ; or, 
The A-B-C of True Living. Forti- 
eth thousand. 310 pp. 

THE NEW GLUTTON OR EPI- 
CURE i OR, Economic NutritIon. 
240 pp. Just issued, 

HAPPINESS AS found in Forethought 
MINUS Fearthought. Sixth thousand. 
251 pp. 

THAT LAST WAIFj or. Social 
Quarantine. 270 pp. 



■M^ 



CONTENTS 

The New Menticulture - - vii 

Theory -----,- 13 

i\ Personal Experience - - - 25 

A Discussion 47 

Plymouth Church Club and Armour 

Institute ----- 59 

Diagnosis and Remedy - - y - 65 

A Prescription - . . - y^ 

Scraps of Evidence - - - - 77 

First Principles Overlooked - - 113 

Slaves or Freemen — Which? - - 123 

Organization 139 

Hope - - - - - - - 145 

Twentieth Century Hope - - 149 

Corroborative and Assistive Criticism 193 

Two Splendid Examples - - - 203 

Press Appreciation - - - - 211 

University Collaboration - - 213 

Press Collaboration - - - - 235 

Medical Collaboration - - - 267 



H^ 



PREFACE 

Medical science had struggled for 
centuries with the repression and 
amelioration of physical disease before 
it discovered the possibility of pre- 
vention by killing the germ. 

Mental science pursued the same 
course of attempted repression in this 
country until quite recently it was 
found that mental afflictions have 
germs also, and it naturally follows 
that any who are interested in the 
subject should try to discover, not 
only the germs themselves, but methods 
of getting rid of them. 

The discovery that I have made is 
not new, as Christ, Buddha, Aristotle, 
Omar Khayyam and many others, 
have all suggested that the elimi- 



VI PREFACE 

nation of the evil passions is entirely 
possible; but my special analysis of 
them, and the easy method of de- 
feat that I have found possible to 
myself, have excited such interest, 

that I have been induced to publish 
them, without attempting to follow 
the subject beyond the elementary 
stage. 

The theory that I have built up is 
based on a proper estimation of the 
limitations of mental weaknesses, a 
discovery that they have roots, and 
also that they can be '' pulled out 
by the roots " and disposed of just 
like any other weeds ; only that the 
task, being mental and not physical, 
can be more easily performed. 

Literary grace has been sacrificed 
in the belief that redundant reference 
to the germs will be effective in bring- 
ing them into contempt. 



Preface 

THE NEW MENTICULTURE 

It is now more than ten years since 
this crude little expression of fireside 
philosophy was published, and that it 
has found a responsive chord in the 
sympathies of many is evidenced by 
the issue of many editions. 

During the intervening ten years the 
author has given unremitting attention 
to the study of human weaknesses, and 
has been learning means of avoiding 
them. In the battle of man for life 
Nature has been tamed, harnessed, do- 
mesticated, and enlisted in his service, 
so that means of luxurious existence 
and infinite recreation are almost as 
free as the air we breathe and the 
water we drink. Every one may en- 
joy now, without let or hindrance, 



Vlll PREFACE 

what was impossible to our forebears 
of a few centuries ago. The acceler- 
ation of our luxurious progress has 
been so great within the last quarter 
of a century that it is quite impossible 
to keep up with mere reading about the 
details of its advancement even though 
we merely scan the generous pages of 
a daily press. 

As a matter of intrinsic fact it is pos- 
sible for a person of the common intelli- 
gence of the day, arrived at the age of 
discretion, to earn easily in an hour what 
is really necessary for his daily suste- 
nance and comfort and have the rest of 
the day free to enjoy parks and galleries 
or delve or recreate in libraries if he 
prefer books. Or he or she, if they are 
forethoughtful, may utilize as much of 
the remaining time of the day as they 
like to add to their surplus of wealth for 
use when they become too old to work 
or are tired of routine occupation. 



THE NEW MENTICULTURE IX 

PROFITABLE SPENDING 

The great art in life now is not to 
know best how to earn a mere suste- 
nance, but to learn the art of most profit- 
able spending. Captains of industry 
there are now who devise means of 
profitable occupation for the masses, 
and to whom any healthy, decently in- 
telligent man or woman may sell their 
labor for sufficient to sustain them in 
comfort, if! — and in this IF is the 
whole secret of the success or non- 
success of happy and profitable living 
— if they understand and practise the 
art of profitable spending. 

This is one of the fundamental re- 
quirements of MENTICULTURE, but the 
science of profitable earning and profit- 
able spending does not all rest in the 
handling of money. Money is but an 
outside matter. Money can be had for 
energy any time we have energy to sell 
under willing conditions. 

Energy, then, is what we want mo'st, 



X PREFACE 

and with it we can buy money, enjoy 
the luxuries of civilization, command 
circumstances, and even attain posses- 
sion of power over millions. 

To possess energy and understand 
the art of the profitable spending of 
energy, — that is the beginning of 

MENTICULTURE. 

The first edition of this book tackled 
the question of systematic menticul- 
TURE in the middle. It dealt with a 
hypothetical mind rich in possibilities, 
but dreadfully perverted ; possessed of 
aesthetic culture and refinement, but 
full of the poison of fearthought. It 
appealed to minds possessed of the cul- 
ture to enjoy nature and art and usually 
surrounded by ample means of comfort, 
but constantly occupied with the silly 
perversions of worry, anger, jealousy, 
grief, suspicion, and the like. To cure 
such it was only necessary to persuade 
them to stop worrying and fearing and 
rowing and suspecting, and turn to the 
enjoyment of their surroundings of good 



THE NEW MENTICULTURE XI 

fortune. Many took the advice and 
changed the point-of-view from the dark 
side to the bright side of their sur- 
roundings, and one of the most en- 
joyed of compensations derived from 
MENTICULTURE and following its wide 
distribution has been the expressed 
gratitude of persons of all conditions 
in life to whom the advice has been 
" better than medicine " and w^hose 
change of point-of-view has meant a 
change from misery to happiness. 

PATRIARCHAL APPRECIATION 

Only a few weeks ago the author had 
the pleasure of visiting the sea-side 
home of the veteran artist, patriarch, and 
philosopher, Joseph Jefferson ; and of 
renewing an acquaintance that had 
lapsed for some seven or eight years on 
account of the absence of the author 
from the sphere of the philosopher's 
life and activity. 

Seven years is a long time to sever 
an acquaintance without weakening the 



Xll PREFACE 

memory, especially when the list of 
acquaintance is scattered over a whole 
nation or world ; and hence the author 
approached his old friend of other days 
somewhat in trepidation at the possi- 
bility of not being remembered ; or, if 
remembered, but dimly so ; but such is 
the power of sympathetic menticulture 
that this did not happen in the present 
case. 

The greeting was as cordial as any 
fond hope might wish, and memory re- 
called many trivial incidents of the old 
acquaintanceship which might easily 
have been forgotten. Even the joint ap- 
preciation of the sentiment surrounding 
the old mill-wheel on the Louisiana es- 
tate of Mr. Jefferson was recalled and 
another spoke taken from the old relic 
to serve as a pleasant souvenir of the 
day when Eugene Field and Randolph 
Natili and Henry Rightor and I forded 
the salt marshes of New Iberia in an 
Acadian ark through near two feet of 
equinoctial flood and visited the patri- 



THE NEW MENTICULTURE Xlll 

arch in his salt-island, cypress-bearded 
home on the Gulf of Mexico. 

Crow's Nest, among the pines on the 
high shore overlooking Buzzards Bay in 
Massachusetts, and covering the undula- 
tions of many an acre in the center of a 
worldly Paradise, is as gloriously beau- 
tiful in its way as Jefferson's Island in 
the Acadian district of Louisiana is 
poetically and quaintly beautiful in an- 
other way. Together they represent 
perfect types of different kinds of love- 
liness and are legally isolated personal 
possessions for which any prince " of 
the blood " or of fortune or prosperity 
might well give his patrimony for the 
mere deed and title ; but in addition 
to this legal title to beautiful es- 
tates Patriarch Jefferson has about him 
twenty-three descendants, and Death 
has not invaded his patriarchy for 
more than twenty-five years. 

To support this ideal family commune 
Mr. Jefferson has abundant invested 
means, and the world to draw upon 



XIV PREFACE 

any time that he chooses to pass an 
agreeable evening with old friends and 
new friends in the public palaces of 
mutual entertainment. 

" Good fortune, to be sure," you will 
say, and " who could desire more ? " 
And you will say true; but even this 
luxury of good fortune can only be 
enjoyed through an intelligent and 
grateful appreciation. In the midst of 
such opportunity a perverted point-of- 
view may wreck the fairest possibilities 
and kill the beneficence of it all. 

During the visit of the other day 
reference was made to this little book 
in a way which brought great joy to the 
heart of the author. When comment 
was made on the beauty of Crow's Nest; 
on the art treasures it contains ; on its 
superb location and splendid adorn- 
ment ; the philosopher-owner of it all 
sighed a poetic sigh, and exclaimed, 
" Yes ; it is beautiful indeed, but the 
best of it all is that we are filled with 
the spirit of appreciation, and that is 



THE NEW MENTICULTURE XV 

far more valuable than legal ownership. 
Eight or ten years ago another home 
stood upon this spot but it was licked 
up in an hour by the fire fiend, almost 
catching some of my dear ones in its 
jaws, so sudden was the spread of the 
flame. There were more treasures of 
art here then than there are now and 
they all went up in smoke. It was a 
great calamity, for works of distinguished 
art cannot be replaced — are lost for- 
ever — but it did not interfere for a 
moment with our appreciation of what 
was left, — the pines, the bay, the sky, 
the picturesque undulations, the carpets 
of moss and pine needles, the balmy 
breezes which come here to play in 
summer, and the blessing of a thou- 
sand friends whom fond memory can 
recall whenever it wishes. 

NOT ALWAYS SO 

" But it was not always so. I realize 
the difference between keen apprecia- 
tion, just appreciation, laudable appre- 



XVI PREFACE 

ciation and the lack of it, and I am 
indebted to a little book called menti- 
CULTURE for my keenest appreciation of 
APPRECIATION. And the best of it is, 
I appreciate the fact that what I ap- 
preciate most — the beauties of nature 
and the wealth of art open to public 
enjoyment — are equally the free pos- 
session of all the world. The few pic- 
tures which I have brought here to 
grace my home are but a sample, and 
a very small sample, of the many that 
are free to the whole people in the gal- 
leries ; my private park is lovely, but 
there are thousands of acres of public 
parks quite as beautiful ; and all that 
any of us needs to do to enjoy, even 
if we do not otherwise own, all this 
world of art and nature is to preserve 
our health ; and health is merely the 
heritage and the result of the simplest 
economy. Put aside envy of title and 
the whole world is the possession of 
all the people, divided up into separate 
visual horizons. 



THE NEW MENTICULTURE xvil 
THE CENTER OF THE WORLD 

" Each person is the center of a hori- 
zon; the center of a world; the center 
of his world. 

All one has to do to possess the 
world, without the trouble of caring 
for it, the cost of insuring it, and the 
worry of defending it from theft and 
abuse, is to change his center of point- 
of-view and cultivate his appreciation 
sufficiently to cover the whole world. 
He may not care to travel, may not 
like the bother of travel or have the 
means or time iox journeying, but may 
prefer to stay around about one locality 
and spend his time enjoying what that 
single horizon contains. 

" I defy any person, even if he live to 
be an hundred and fifty, to exhaust the 
possibility of enjoyment coming from ac- 
quaintance with nature and appreciation 
of what Nature can do and does do in 
any single horizon. 

" No ; I have not forgotten the days 



& 



XVlll PREFACE 

when friend Fletcher and I walked on 
the sands of Pass Christian arm in arm 
and discussed the potency of a cultivated 
appreciation. I was losing my grip on 
life then and was paving the way to a 
severe illness, but the suggestions of 
MENTicuLTURE and the optimism of its 
author have set me on a throne in the 
center of any horizon I happen to be 
in and has placed in my hand a scep- 
ter called APPRECIATION, and by these 
titles and possessions I am master of 
my happiness. 

" Yes ; Death, and a whole lot of ene- 
mies of mankind have come along with 
their threats and have tried to pick a 
quarrel with me since I got possession 
of the right end of the point-of-view, 
but have turned away smiling at my 
complacence and confidence. 

" I mentioned Death as one of the 
enemies of mankind without due con- 
sideration. I do not so consider death. 
I certainly do not want to live forever, 
and who does ? I 'm too curious about 



THE NEW MENTICULTURE xix 

the future, and I have too much faith 
in the progressive evolution of things 
and in the indestructibility of matter — 
soul matter as well as atomic matter — 
to have any doubt about the future. 
Neither would I have the future spoiled 
by having my curiosity satisfied. I can 
build, in my own imagination, the best 
kind of a future that I am capable of 
constructing, and that is good enough 
for me to play with now. 

" But I give very little thought to 
the future. I am holding that in re- 
serve. The present is so full of possi- 
bilities of enjoyment that I have no 
time for the consideration of the future. 
I believe with Dr. Myles, the lamented 
head of the Charity Hospital in New 
Orleans, whom you used to tell me 
about, that " Deeds, not Creeds ; One 
World at a Time," is a good motto in 
life. All the interest I have in the 
future, that I want practically settled 
before I die, is that it is understood 
that I am to be cremated; that I am 



XX PREFACE 

not to be mourned ; that I am not to 
encumber the earth with a decaying 
carcass, and that I am not to be sent 
on my way into the Beyond with an 
accompaniment of grief and tears, for 
I am not going on that kind of a 
journey. I 'm going fishing when I 
depart this beautiful world ; but it will 
be fishing for a better world and not 
a worse one. Whichever way I radi- 
ate I am sure it will be for good. 

" No ; I should say not. My memory 
may not be as good as it used to be, but 
I am not apt to forget menticulture or 
the menticulture man." 

There could be no better illustration 
of the NEW MENTICULTURE than the 
application which our mutual friend, 
everybody's friend, — Rip Van Winkle, 
— has made of it; not on the stage, 
but in every-day life. 

There was no hereditary fortune 
to help little Joseph Jefferson on his 
way from birth behind the scenes in a 
country theatre to kingship over any 



THE NEW MENTICULTURE xxi 

horizon of which he happens to be 
the center. An every-day Epicurean 
philosophy, which is free to all the 
world and is denied to none, has been 
the capital on which Joseph has traded 
and from which he has drawn handsome 
dividends. He has certainly been fa- 
vored of fortune, but not more so than 
is the birthright of every one who may 
pay attention to his opportunities. 

EVERYBODY LOVES A LOVER 

" Everybody loves a lover " is a true 
saying. I have spent hours in the soci- 
ety of a painfully deformed person whose 
beauty of intellect made me entirely 
forget his deformity of body. He was 
an optimist of the finest cast; saw 
beauty in everybody and in everything 
and in appreciation of externals forgot 
his own deformity. It were but the 
result of a little time to change the 
ideals of grace of form from the arrow- 
like straightness of an Adonis to the 
warped semblance of a human being 



XXU PREFACE 

if Adonis persisted in being a perpetu- 
ally frowning pessimist and Quasimodo 
constantly radiated smiles. 

It is not in the hereditary equipment 
that strength lies but in the radiations 
of an intelligent appreciation. 

ALL IN THE POINT-OF-VIEW 

Yes, it is all due to the point-of-view, 
and the point-of-view is as but putty in 
the hands of intelligence. 

How best to possess the point-of- 
view ? 

I will tell you. Listen. 

Begin at the beginning, and begin 
right. 

You may reply, " But I have made a 
beginning, and I haven't started right." 

Begin again. I began afresh after I 
was forty; Mr. Jefferson began anew 
after he was sixty ; Luigi Cornaro made 
a distinguished success of life, became 
the patron and example of the great 
Venetian painter Titian, after he had 
passed middle life and there is no more 



THE NEW MENTICULTURE XXUl 

truthful saying than; "It is never too 
late to mend." Cornaro was a physical 
wreck at about forty ; reformed by be- 
ginning afresh at the beginning of all 
efficiency ; regulated his nutrition ; and 
died sweetly and naturally at about one 
hundred. Are you expecting to live ten 
years, five years, one year, a month, or 
only a day ; begin anew for that decade, 
that year, or that day. It will pay, and 
pay well. 

Possibly the present expectation of 
only a brief sojourn here may be length- 
ened by a new beginning. Such medi- 
cine has been known to cure disease and 
prolong life. I do not ask any friend to 
take special pains to prolong life for any 
special value to be placed upon life itself. 
I believe with Patriarch Jefferson that 
death is but an incident of promotion in 
a progressive evolutionary process. But 
while w^e do live let us live right, even if 
it be for only a minute. We are, as it 
were, flowers in the human bouquet; let 
us draw inspiration from the possibilities 



XXIV PREFACE 

of things and freshen up if only for an 
afternoon or an evening. 

But you ask, " Where shall we 
begin ? " 

There is but one beginning, and that 
beginning is the rational and scientific 
care of our present personal equipment, 
whatever that may happen to be. First, 
we have our body, the house of the 
mind, the granary of the mind, the fuel 
of the mind, the tool of the mind. We 
have to take the body as we find it now. 
Possibly it has been abused and has 
been made weak and sick and sensitive 
to draughts and indigestion. No matter, 
it is the best we have, and any regrets 
about " what might have been " are but 
a waste of time. If it is out of repair, 
let repairs begin at once; it will divert 
the mind from the accustomed ills and 
illusions. How can repairs be made.f* 
Who is the best doctor .f* These are 
natural questions, but easily answered. 
Your own blood, your glandular secre- 
tions, your own body itself is its own 



THE NEW MENTICULTURE xxv 

best doctor, but you must needs help it. 
This is the important question. You 
must help, but the help consists in let- 
ting the body alone at first until normal 
appetite is evident, and then of obeying 
its simple orders, which are always most 
agreeably given, afterwards. 

Your body does not ask you to take 
medicine, and you need not have your 
nose held while you are taking the 
medicine a sick body needs. The best 
body-medicine is good food, selected by 
a normal appetite ; and eaten only with 
a " gusto " and a grateful appreciation. 
But even this good medicine must be 
taken only at the right time and only 
in the right manner. All you are asked 
to do is to stop putting stuff into the 
stomach until there is a demand of true 
appetite for something; and you may be 
assured, if you begin right and follow the 
right course, the orders from the stomach 
— we will say " stomach " for convenience 
of localization — will be agreeable orders 
and not difficult to follow. 



t 



XXVI PREFACE 

Yes, the mind has a habitat and a com- 
missariat and a whole outfit of service 
that needs to be looked after. 

Taking the body as a necessary fact 
and factor, and taking it as we must 
needs do, as we find it, the next thing to 
consider is its immediate and continued 
nourishment. In the nutriment of the 
body, in the economy of its nutrition 
and the care of its aHmentation, lies the 
first great secret of beginning right with 
the mind. 

It is too long a story for this section 
of MENTicuLTURE. It is a department 
by itself. In " The New Glutton or 
Epicure," and in "The A. B.-Z. of 
Our Own Nutrition," is given the 
latest scientific information relative to 
the detail of the nourishment, or ali- 
mentation of the body. We do the 
alimentation or feeding, and Nature 
does the nourishing out of what we 
furnish. 



THE NEW MENTICULTURE xxvu 
TENTH ANNIVERSARY 

We will call this the tenth anniversary 
of the birth of menticulture in the par- 
ticular form of this particular volume. 
Its acquaintances are numbered by the 
hundreds of thousands, and many are as 
grateful for some simple suggestion as 
is the author himself, as is Mr. Jeffer- 
son, and as are the many whose note of 
appreciation has been added to that of 
the author in entering upon apprecia- 
tion in its largest sense and cultivating 
it to its keenest possibilities, which con- 
stitutes MENTICULTURE. 

In the following brief report of a tri- 
umph of the basic idea underlying the 
study of MENTICULTURE — causc elimina- 
tion — the author acts simply as a scribe 
and a reporter. The wages that menti- 
culture has paid him have been gen- 
erous and as an employee and servant 
he is amply satisfied and duly grateful. 
The personality amounts to nothing, and 
the accomplishment is all due to men- 



» • * 



xxviil PREFACE 

TicuLTURE. Hence the recital of the 
progress is impersonal. 

CAUSES LOCATED 

Without describing how it was that 
we first located the head devils of our 
troubles in indigestion and in mal-as- 
siMiLATiON, we will State that when we 
found these parent devils and killed them 
we exterminated the whole brood. Our 
method of extermination is recounted in 
the two sections of the " A. B. C. Life 
Series " before mentioned. In " The 
New Glutton or Epicure " and " The 
A. B.-Z. of Our Own Nutrition " 
will be found the theory of campaign, 
but to be made of general use it be- 
came necessary to have the indigestion 
devil duly arraigned in court and con- 
demned by competent authority. 

court ORGANIZED 

In order to dp this it was necessary 
to secure the cooperation of science. 
In order to interest science it was 



THE NEW MENTICULTURE xxix 

necessary to make out a worthy case. 
With the assistance of Van Someren 
of Venice a good case was made out 
and brought before the British Medi- 
cal Association and the International 
Congress of Physiologists at Turin, 
Italy. 

To prove the case examination was 
invited at the University of Cambridge, 
England, and afterwards at Yale Uni- 
versity, in the United States. The re- 
ports of these examinations are given 
in the " A. B.-Z " referred to. 

Having demonstrated the presence of 
errors in the present understanding of 
nutrition, to which indigestion is due, 
it became necessary to extend the exam- 
ination to various centers of disturbance 
to see if the indigestion which formerly 
afflicted us is the same which afflicts 
men in general. 

Here it was that the Good Fairies 
served us a good turn. We were on a 
ship, — the good Commonwealth, return- 
ing home to Venice with the laurels of 



§ 



XXX PREFACE 

a victory in the Yale Court, sustained 
by a confirmation in the Calorimiter 
Court at Middletown, Conn., over which 
Judges Atwater and Benedict preside. 
We had learned to run the body machine 
on half the heat, or a third of the fuel, 
and with only one tenth of the waste 
of common indigestion. That was a 
considerable triumph, but it related to 
only a few favored human machines. 
It was necessary to try the economy on 
a whole lot of machines for a consider- 
able period, and to get faithful subjects 
for so long a time was not so easy. 
Busy persons were too busy, and lazy 
persons who were not busy were too 
lazy to serve the purposes of the inves- 
tigation which was ready to be attempted 
at Yale. 

On the steamer were Surgeon-Gen- 
eral Robert Maitland O'Reilly of the 
United States Army, on his way to 
attend a Medical Congress at Madrid, 
Spain. There was also Major-General 
Leonard Wood on his way to take com- 



THE NEW MENTICULTURE xxxi 

mand in the Philippines. These two 
officers had just completed a victory 
over Yellow Fever in Cuba and were 
flushed with success, ready to attack 
any germinal cause of things or search 
for any " nigger in any woodpile." 

They agreed with the author in 
condemnation of indigestion as the 
germinal cause of most human ills and 
inefficiency, and were resourceful in sug- 
gesting a plan of campaign. Both were 
doctors and of the militant order, and 
INDIGESTION was the common enemy 
of mankind. They believed that the 
author of menticulture had located and 
killed his particular " nigger," as related 
in the reports of the Cambridge and 
Yale and Middleton tests, and they 
also believed that his plan of cam- 
paign was a good one to try. 

Armed with a brace of letters from 
General Wood to the President and to 
Mr. Elihu Root, Secretary of War, the 
author returned to the United States 
to find that General O'Reilly had al- 



xxxil PREFACE 

ready arrived home from Madrid and 
had started enquiry as to ways and 
means of Army Medical Participation 
in the campaign. 

It was not difficult to bring the forces 
of Science and of the Army together. 
Dr. Bowditch, one of the trustees of 
the Bache Fund administered by the 
National Academy of Sciences, is one 
of the Board of Assessors in our Nu- 
trition Court. He had been a soldier 
in his youth, and was professor of phys- 
iology in the Harvard Medical School 
when Leonard Wood was a student 
there. 

The Bache Fund could only supply 
one thousand dollars towards laboratory 
expenses, but the balance of the five 
thousand dollars required was secured 
through MENTicuLTURE, and Professor 
Chittenden fathered the investigation. 

The Secretary of War authorized the 
cooperation of a company of hospital 
attendants under direction of General 
O'Reilly and the members of his staff. 



THE NEW MENTICULTURE xxxiii 

The presence of the medico-scientific 
force at New Haven, as has been re- 
ported in the newspapers, is but a de- 
tail of the development of this very 
MENTicuLTURAL idea and it is of vital 
importance to would-be menticulturists 
that they should appreciate the connec- 
tion and apply the information which 
grows out of the investigation. 

As stated by Professor Chittenden in 
his announcement of the arrival of the 
medicos at Yale, there are no theories 
to support, not even the theory of non- 
theory, but certain enquiry is to be 
made into the economies of sustenance 
on a scientific basis. Menticulturists 
will do well to follow the lead of the 
studies set down in " The New Glut- 
ton or Epicure," in " The A. B.-Z. 
of OUR own Nutrition," and whatever 
may happen in the way of develop- 
ments at Yale, and learn something 
very much to their advantage in help- 
ing the mind to cultivate keenness, con- 
serve energy, and breathe happiness. 



xxxiv , PREFACE 

It is also fitting to state that all this 
enthusiasm of nutrition reform is in- 
spired by a wish to meet the coming 
generation with exact knowledge regard- 
ing their. fundamental requirements in 

MENTICULTURE. 

The special plea for this crying need 
is uttered in the author's book, " That 
Last Waif." In finding a way to 
begin right ourselves we are gaining a 
knowledge that will be most useful for 
mothers and kindergartners to possess, 
and, through these angelic agents, for 
the coming generations to acquire with 
their mother's milk and their first im- 
pressions of right and wrong, a right, 
easy, and agreeable way of promoting 
a NEW MENTICULTURE through vigilant 
practice of economic nutrition. 



THEORY 



MENTICULTURE 



THEORY 

All of the evil passions are trace- 
able to one of two roots. 

Anger is the root of all the aggres- 
sive passions. 

Worry is the root of all the cow- 
ardly passions. 

Envy, spite, revenge, impatience, 
annoyance, selfishness, prejudice, un- 
rest, and the like are all phases of 
anger. 

Jealousy, fear, the belittling of self, 
the blues, and all the introspective 
forms of depression are the children of 
worry. 

Anger and worry are the most un- 
profitable conditions known to man. 
While they are in possession of the 
mind, both mental and physical growth 
are suspended, 

13 



o 



J 



14 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

Anger and worry are thieves that 
steal precious time and energy from 
life. 

Anger is a highway robber and 
worry is a sneak thief. 

Anger and worry are the most 
potent forms of self-abuse, for the 
reason that in many cases anger is 
the result of misunderstanding, and 
in most cases worry's prophecies never 
come true; or, if they do, the fulfil- 
ment is generally caused by the worry 
itself. 

Anger and worry do not stimulate 
to any good end. 

Anger and worry not only dwarf 
and depress, but sometimes kill. 

Anger and worry are bad habits of 
the mind and not necessary ingredients. 

Anger and worry are no more 
necessary than other passions civilized 
man has learned to control, and it is 
only needful to realize that they are 
unnecessary in order to make it impos- 
sible to feel, much less to show them. 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 15 

Anger and worry cannot be elim- 
inated through process of repression 
any more than a weed can be killed by 
cutting down the stalk, or a cancer 
can be cured from the surface, or the 
drinking habit can be gotten rid of by 
"tapering off." Germ eradication is 
not only the easiest, but the only sure 
cure for all physical diseases and men- 
tal handicaps. 

The dispossession of anger and 
worry does not cause indifference or 
encourage indolence. 

The natural tendency of the eman- 
cipated mind is towards growth, both 
intellectual and spiritual, just as the 
tendency of plant life is towards vig- 
orous growth and perfect blossoming, 
if it is kept free from the gnawings 
of cankerous worms. 

Anger and worry are as much para- 
sites as are the cankerous worms that 
attack plants. The intelligent horti- 
culturist knows that the worms are 
parasites, picks them off his plant. 



\ 



16 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

and throws them away too far to re- 
turn. The intelligent menticulturist 
of the future will treat anger and worry 
in the same intelligent manner. 

It is not necessary to engage in 
battle the small army of lesser passions 
if you concentrate your efforts against 
anger and worry, for they are all chil- 
dren of these parents. Oppose them 
with a bold front ; make one heroic 
stand against them and they and all of 
their children will fly. Disown them 
once and the ability to re-adopt them 
will have disappeared with them. 

Anger and worry, especially worry, 
are the cause of most of the drunken- 
ness and other dissipations which are 
the curses of the age. Excuse for them 
or temptation to them is found in the 
desire to smother the depression which 
they themselves cause. 

Anger and worry are creations of 
the mind, and can be dispelled by the 
same power that gave them birth. 

Anger and worry are caused by 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 1 7 

phantoms that we create within our- 
selves and whose only strength is 
that with which we endow them. 

Anger and worry are like echoes ; 
they do not exist until we call for 
them, and the louder we call, the 
louder is their response. We can 
never drown them ; yet, if let alone, 
they drown themselves. 

Fear is possibly the truer name for 
the cowardly root-passion than worry ; 
but as they are synonymous, and as 
anger and worry are more frequently 
used together, and worry has a less 
formidable sound, I have chosen to 
present it for attack under that title. 

While the evil passions align them- 
selves into two classes, as the offshoots 
of Anger and Worry; they are, in fact, 
all growths from one root. Worry (or \ 
fear) is the male principle, as it were, 
without which, all the others wither ; 
and die. For instance; if we do not 
worry, we do not fear ; and if we 
do not fear aggression, or insult, or ' 



^ 



l8 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

slight, we do not become angry. We 
quarrel most frequently with what we 
fear is thought or intended by our 
adversary, and least frequently with 
what he actually does or thinks. On 
the other hand our adversary endows 
us with intentions which he himself 
creates, and each puts his own fuel 
on the fire, to increase the heat of the 
controversy. 

In Emancipation there is no fear, 
'(or worry) and consequently no fuel 
^for discord. 

Emancipation is a disarmament 
^ which disarms others, but adds strength 
to itself. 

* To the Emancipated every mo- 
ment is a delight, or a moment of 
calm, during which he is susceptible 
orily'to good impressions, and the best 
interpretation of everything, no mattei 
what the external conditions. Even in 
cases of sickness, the tendency of the 
emancipated mind is so inclined to 
gratitude for the limitations of the 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 19 

calamity, that it has little if any room 
left for regret. Its thankful apprecia- 
tion of a half loaf of blessings, leaves 
no place for disappointment that it is 
not a whole one, and it certainly has 
no desire to question the wisdom of 
the process of evolution to which it is 
related. 

To question or to regret the inevita- 
ble seems to the emancipated mind the 
greatest folly imaginable. It certainly 
is as foolish as barking at the moon. 

" Sweet sorrow " must not be classed 
with the depressing passions. It is the 
tenderest expression of love. If tears 
of love or of sympathy spring to the 
eyes, do not repress them ; do not be 
ashamed of them ; they are like dew 
from Heaven and promote the growth 
of the soul. 

Neither must friendly rivalry, nor 
ambition to excel, be classed as ag- 
gressions; as they are phases of growth. 

The disposition of the Emancipated 
is to switch the current of the Divine 



ii 



20 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

Spark (which is the energy of man) 
on to wires that connect with motors 
belted to good acts, and good thoughts, 
and worthy appreciation, and to cut out 
the circuits of worry and anger and their 
branch lines entirely, leaving them to 
rust and decay through disuse. It is a 
matter of voluntary selection. The 
same effort of thought can be made 
to bless or to curse ; can stimulate to 
good or stimulate to bad ; can propel 
or retard ; can aid or obstruct ; can 
nourish or kill. 

Nature uses the same atoms to per- 
form many services of widely differing 
purpose. Where she is inanimate the 
blind and dumb law of the ''survival 
of the fittest" rules supreme. In her 
lowest forms of life this law begins to 
be modified by selection, and protection 
from without. In the higher forms of 
animal life memory, and selection, and 
division of labor, and provision, and 
gratitude, show a degree of develop- 
ment that is beautiful indeed ; but it 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 21 

is left to man to perfect this develop- 
ment within himself. To him is given 
the power, through cultivation, to pro- 
mote, without limit, growth towards 
Perfection, which is the evidence of 
Divinity in him. 

Soft mist, down-falling, from its cloud domain. 
Bathes all the thirsty land with gentle rain ; 
Again, to Heaven ascends, by sunbeams wooed, 
Then plunges back to earth in torrent mood. 

As gentle rain it swells the softening seed ; 
In torrent force, it wrecks with demon greed ; 
Now, like the radiance of a loving heart ; 
Now, like the scorching of a lightning dart. 

The self-same atom, hidden in a tear. 
May shine with love, or 'note a potent fear ; 
When bound to others form the flintiest stone ; 
Or, floating freely, bear the subtlest tone. 

Thoughts are like atoms, fashioned by the will ; 
Each has a mission, charged with good or ill ; 
Sometimes to bless ; anon to desolate ; 
Love's messenger; or harbinger of hate. 

In Nature's hands, one atom plays two parts, 
As may be needed in her several arts ; 
In man alone, should love forever shine ; 
Displacing hate ; proclaiming man Divine. 

Love, and Appreciation, and Grati- 
tude, — the ever-present and ever- 



22 MENTICULTURE 

faithful handmaids of Emancipation, — 
are the natural and only conditions 
favorable to growth ; they are the less 
assertive but stronger attributes which 
are always waiting to occupy the places 
left vacant by anger and worry, and 
to fill the "void which Nature abhors." 
Born of them is that other Divine at- 
tribute called Help or Charity, and 
together they stimulate to good action 
and good thought, and lift into life 
that plant of the soul, the Divine 
Responsibility of each member of the 
human family. 

Anger and worry are the rankest 
\ :; ; forms of Egotism. 

^ * Emancipation is the reverse of 

Phariseeism. Phariseeism is self-suffi- 
ciency ; while Emancipation shows its 
desire for growth, through the prepara- 
tion of its mental and spiritual entity 
for unimpaired growth, by clearing it 
of the weeds of egotism. 



A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE 



A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE 

It was my privilege one evening to 
be with Prof. Fenollosa in his Japan- 
esque apartment in Boston. Almost 
every article in view was the product of 
some Japanese artist who had been the 
friend of Prof. Fenollosa in Japan. 
The odor of incense added perceptibly 
to the calming influence of the envir- 
onment. 

Many years ago we had met in far- 
off Japan amid similar surroundings, 
and had discussed theories of true 
living that had been a source of great 
pleasure to me, and whose influence 
had been with me to many countries 
and climes, helping me to enjoy more 
fully than I otherwise could, the beau- 
ties of nature, and of art, and of life. 

We were exchanging the experi- 
ences of the intervening years, and I \ \ A 
became acutely interested in his ac- 

25 



26 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

count of the wonderful degree of cult- 
ure and self-control attained by some 
of his Japanese friends through the 
practice of the Buddhist discipline. 

It was all so interesting and beauti- 
ful, that under the spell of the recital 
and the surroundings, I longed to taste 
some of the sweets of the calm he pic- 
tured, and begged him to tell me the 
process of the discipline, so that per- 
chance I might follow it and reap some 
of the benefits. 

The philosopher saw that I was 
serious in my desire, and his face lit 
up with approval as he said, *' It is not 
easy to communicate at a sitting what 
took me years of study to learn, but I 
can at least put you in the way of a 
start. I can tell you where to begin to 
grow. Vou must first get rid of anger 
and worry!' *' But," said I, "is that 
possible?" "Yes," replied he, "it is 
possible to the Japanese, and ought to 
be possible to us. 

I was startled at the suggestion of 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 27 

the possibility of the entire repression 
of anger and worry. I knew that their 
repression was counselled by Chris- 
tianity and Buddhism, and presumably 
by all codes of religion and ethics; but 
I had never considered getting rid of 
them as a human possibility, except 
under conditions of health and wealth 
and ease, to which few, if any, ever 
attain. '^ 

On my walk back to the Parker . 
House, a distance of fully two miles, I 
could hot think oi anything else but 
the words, ''g-e^ rid^ ''get rid;'' and 
the idea must have continued to pos- 
sess me during my sleeping hours, for 
the first consciousness in the morning 
brought back the same thought, with 
the revelation of a discovery, which 
framed itself into the reasoning, 
*' If it is possible to get rid of anger 
and worry, why is it necessary to have \ 
them at all ?" I felt the strength of j 
the argument and at once accepted the / 
reasoning. The baby had discovered 



28 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

that It could walk. It would scorn to 
creep any longer. 

From the instant I realized that 
these cancer spots of worry and anger 
were removable, they left me. With 
the discovery of their weakness they 
were exorcised. From that time life 
has had an entirely changed aspect. 

Although from that moment the 
possibility and desirability of freedom 
from the depressing passions has been 
a reality to me, it took me some months 
to feel absolute security in my new 
position; but, as the usual occasions for 
worry and anger have presented them- 
selves over and over again, and I 
have been unable to feel them in the 
slightest degree, I no longer dread or 
guard against them, and I am amazed 
at my increased energy and vigor of 
mind; — at my strength to meet situa- 
tions of all kinds, and at my disposition 
to love and appreciate everything. 

I have had occasion to travel more 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 29 

than ten thousand miles by rail since 
that morning ; North, South, East and 
West, with the varying comforts and 
discomforts, as they used to be. The 
same Pullman porter, conductor, hotel 
waiter, peddler, book-agent, cabman, 
and others, who were formerly a source 
of annoyance and irritation have been 
met, but I am not conscious of a single 
incivility. All at once the whole 
world has turned good to me. I am 
sure the change is not so much in the 
world as in me. I have become, a3 it 
were, sensitive only to the rays of 
good, as some photographic films of 
recent invention are sensitive only to 
certain single colored rays of light. 
If we are wise we never leave 
school. When the academy and the 
college have put us through their cur- 
riculum, we have still before us the 
example of Nature, and the walks of 
Science, and Art, and Brotherhood, in 
which to search for suggestions to be 



30 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

applied in menticulture. May we not 
learn a lesson from the newly discov- 
ered film ? 

Should not the chemical condition of 
selection be more difficult than a similar 
voluntary mental accomplishment? In 
comparison with a similar process in 
physics the more pliable material of 
the mind ought to be fashioned with 
greater ease. 

I could recount many experiences 
which prove a brand new condition of 
mind, but one more will be sufficient. 
Without the slightest feeling of annoy- 
ance or impatience I have seen a train 
that I had planned to take with a good 
deal of interested and pleasurable an- 
ticipation, move out of a station with- 
out me, because my baggage did not 
arrive. The porter from the hotel 
came running and panting into the 
station just as the train pulled out of 
sight. When he saw me he looked as 
if he feared a scolding, and began to tell 
of being blocked in a crowded street 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 3 1 

and unable to get out. When he had 
finished, I said to him, '' It doesn't 
matter at all, you couldn't help it, so 
we will try it again to-morrow. Here 
is your fee, I am sorry you had all 
this trouble in earning it." The 
look of surprise that came over his 
face was so filled with pleasure that I 
was repaid on the spot for the delay in 
my departure. Next day he would 
not accept a cent for the service, and 
he and I are friends for life. The 
sequence of this incident has no bear- 
ing on its value, but it has a signifi- 
cance. Had I taken the train I 
missed, I would have been caught in a 
wreck in which two persons were 
killed and several wounded, while my 
stay over in Cleveland proved to be 
both pleasant and profitable. 

During the first weeks of my expe- 
rience I was on guard only against 
worry and anger ; but, in the mean- 
time, having noticed the absence of 
the other depressing and dwarfing 



32 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

passions, I began to trace a relation- 
ship, until I was convinced that they 
are all growths from the two roots I 
have specified. 

I have felt the freedom now for so 
long a time that I am sure of my rela- 
tions toward it; and I could no more 
harbor any of the depressing and 
thieving influences that once I nursed 
as a heritage of humanity than a fop 
would voluntarily wallow in a filthy 
gutter: and the strength of the position 
is reinforced by the experience of 
others. 

There is no doubt in my mind that 
pure Christianity, and pure Buddhism, 
and the Mental Sciences, and all Reli- 
gions, fundamentally teach what has 
been a discovery to me; but none of 
them have presented it in the light of 
a simple and easy process of absolute 
elimination. All of the religions 
seemed to me to hinge principally on 
some other life, with the usual features 
of punishment and reward, and with 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 33 

incidental satisfaction or fear in this 
life. But as life reveals itself to me in 
my present condition of mind, this 
world, these fellow men, the blush 
of Spring, the blossom of Summer, 
the flame of Autumn, the sparkle 
of Winter, and the violet-softened 
refulgence of every waking moment 
yield a never failing succession of 
delights. 

At one time I wondered if elimina- 
tion of the passions would not lead to 
indifference and sloth. In my experi- 
ence the contrary is the result. I feel 
such an increased desire to do some- 
thing useful that it seems as if I were 
a boy again and the energy for play 
had returned. I could fight as readily 
as (and better than) ever, if there were 
occasion for it. It does not make one 
a coward. It can't, since fear is one of 
the things eliminated. 

That fear is got ridden of with 
worry is proven in many ways. I no- 
tice the absence of timidity in the 



34 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

presence of any audience I am called 
on to face, whereas I had never before 
conquered a tendency to partial paraly- 
sis on such occasions. Timidity re- 
sulting from a shock has been cured 
also. When I was a boy I was 
standing under a tree which was 
struck by lightning and received a 
shock, from the effects of which I 
never knew exemption until I had 
dissolved partnership with worry. 
Since then lightning, and thunder, and 
storm clouds, with wind-swept torrents 
of rain have been encountered under 
conditions which formerly would have 
caused great depression and discom- 
fort, without experiencing a trace of 
either. Surprise is also greatly modi- 
fied, and one is less liable to become 
startled by unexpected sights or noises. 
Temperaments may differ, but Eman- 
cipation strengthens all. 

It has been suggested to me, in 
argument, that in Nature there is sun- 
shine and shadow, and that every 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 35 

height must have a corresponding de- 
pression, and that immunity from the 
black or shadowy passions is an un^ 
natural condition. This is not true. 
In the process of growth and evolution, 
conditions that once were natural, are 
changed to other conditions equally 
natural. Weeds are pulled up by the 
roots to clear the fields for the grow- 
ing grain. Why should not mental 
weeds be pulled up by the roots also, 
and the mind cleared for growth ? 

My experience teaches me that the 
natural evolution of the emancipated 
mind is dominant calm, varied by sea- 
sons of exaltation, but never of depres- 
sion. It is a healthful succession of 
energy and rest, all blessed with loving 
appreciation, which finds expression 
in ever-present gratitude. 

One morning recently I heard my- 
self audibly thank the clock for strik- 
ing the time for me, and each awaken- 
ing is as if on a much desired holiday, 
no matter what the conditions of the 



36 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

weather or the comforts of life at 
hand. 

Contentment and happiness and 
gratitude and Heaven are generally ac- 
cepted as synonymous terms; but Eman- 
cipation embraces them all, and in it 
only can they all be found. 

As far as I am individually con- 
cerned I am not bothering myself at pres- 
ent as to what the result of this emanci- 
pated condition may be. I have no doubt 
that the perfect health aimed at by 
Christian Science may be one of the 
possibilities, for I note a marked im- 
provement in the way my stomach 
does its duty in assimilating the food 
I give it to handle, and I am sure 
it works better to the sound of a 
song than under the friction of a 
frown. Neither am I wasting any 
of this precious time formulating an 
idea of a future existence or a future 
Heaven. The Heaven that I have 
found within myself is as attractive as 
any that has been promised or that I 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 37 

can Imagine; and I am willing to let 
the growth lead where it will, as long 
as anger and worry and their brood 
have no part in misguiding it; but 1 \ 
feel the value of Mental Emancipation i ]^ 
to be so great that I long to spread the | I 
news of the discovery of an easy and j I 
immediate means of attaining it. J> 1 

The practical benefit of the eman- ' 
cipated mind to the individual, and of 
the emancipated individual to the com- 
munity, can not be over-estimated. 
In every walk in life Emancipation is 
invaluable to the worker, and the 
most potent aid to success. The 
emancipated peanut vender will have 
more customers than his worm- 
eaten neighbor. The emancipated 
merchant will find that trade will pass 
the door of his calamity-howling rival 
and come to him. The emancipated 
writer will find writing an easy and 
pleasant task as compared with that of 
his moody confrere, and that if he has 
occasion to dip his pen in vinegar he 



38 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

can wield it better under the influence 
of judicial calm than he can between 
the gulps of rebellious indigestion. To 
woman Emancipation means every- 
thing. Any other condition to her is 
like an ill fitting garment, and every 
lapse from it is like adding a blotch 
to her complexion which succeeding 
smiles can never entirely efface. 
Each expression of a shadowy passion 
leaves a scar. The Emancipation of 
woman would mean the Emancipation 
of the race. The adoption of the 
germ cure will be woman's means 
to that end, and Emancipation will be 
her Heaven and man's Heaven at the 
same time. 

The influence of emancipated indi- 
viduals in a community could be 
made so great that if there were only 
one in ten, and they should organize 
in clubs for the purpose, they would 
attract or rule the rest for good, 
and something better than the social 
Utopia pictured by Edward Bellamy in 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 39 

"Looking Backward " would follow as 
a natural sequence, and save us from the 
threatened battle between capital and 
labor, which otherwise seems inevita- 
ble. The horrors of such a conflict 
cannot be imagined; and, unless the 
germ cure is sought to avert it, it is 
sure to come. 

The germ cure of the evil passions 
in the individual, followed by the germ 
cure of social clumsiness in the body 
politic, form the only hope of Emanci- 
pation from the evils which beset the 
social structure. For these there is no 
real necessity. There is already such a 
/Surplus of mechanical energy, such a 
surplus of creature comforts, and such a 
surplus of luxuries on our planet, that 
a moderately sensible distribution 
of them, would render every inhab- 
itant comfortable and happy. Among 
the Emancipated the desire to make 
a generous distribution of these sur- 
plus stores would be as natural as 
is the habit of recognizing "the rule of 



40 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

the road " among us all to-day. So 
also, the vast amount of surplus energy 
born of Emancipation would find a nat- 
ural outlet in the arts. 

In suggesting the possibility of a 
Social Paradise or Community Heaven, 
it is presupposed that education along 
the lines of both intellectual and man- 
ual training will have become universal, 
and that every one shall render service 
to his fellows according to his strength; 
also that idleness, when one should 
work, and deception in trade, will have 
come to be classed as crimes, and not 
as evidences of ** shrewdness." 

It has been my good fortune to 
travel to and fro over the earth's sur- 
face for thirty years, years of exper-= 
ience passed among the people of 
many different nations. I have made 
quick comparisons of the habits 
and customs of them all; and I 
have observed how easily some do 
things that others perform clumsily. 
The standard measure of my com- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 4 1 

parison has always been Japan. I 
could not help observing there less 
crime, better appreciation of art and 
nature, more physical dexterity and 
skill, fewer notes out of harmony, and 
more general happiness, gentleness, 
and consideration for fellows and ani- 
mals ; less (almost no) religious or 
sectional prejudice ; a universal patri- 
otism and respect for authority (as 
good children are respectful of the 
authority of beloved parents); a love 
of life, but no fear of death ; and many 
other qualities that have commanded 
the respect of the world under the 
bright light of recent events. 

Brave, gentle, artistic, lovable little 
Japan, which, thirty odd years ago, 
was nursing in quiet seclusion a beauti- 
ful flower of artistic civilization, has been 
rudely but providentially forced into 
the community of nations to teach the 
rest of the world a great lesson in 
the art of true living. By the exer- 
cise of judicious but resistless courage 



42 MENTICULTURE J OR, THE 

she has laid the Oriental Colossus 
who attacked her at her feet ; and 
if the bulldog and buzzard nations of 
the West, do not unite their forces to 
obstruct her inclination, she will lift 
her fallen foe from a condition of 
slavery to barbarous aliens to a con- 
dition of tranquillity and happiness. 
She will do this through the introduc- 
tion of reforms in government and 
administration which she has gathered 
from the best experience of all the 
world. What a missionary Japan is ! 
A missionary of the art of true living. 
A missionary of harmony. The con- 
tact of Japan with the other nations 
made the World's Congress of Relig- 
ions possible ; and what this means to 
the advancement of man on the road to 
harmony and happiness, was recently 
stated by Prof. Max Muller, when he 
prophesied that this event would come 
to be appreciated as the greatest civil- 
izing influence of the Nineteenth cen- 
tury. 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 43 

May the example of Japan set the 
boors of the world to thinking, cause 
them to take their fore feet out of the 
trough, look up to the sun and the 
light of dawning civilization, accept 
the simple teachings of Christ and 
Buddha and common sense, and start 
a Heaven here on earth. Steam and 
electricity have brought the extremes 
of our earth together ; the telescope 
has let us into the secrets of the neigh- 
boring worlds, and logic and common 
sense may find in the possibility of 
ETnancipation a, means of bringing 
Heaven to us in this life. 



A DISCUSSION 



A DISCUSSION 

WHICH FOLLOWED THE READING OF THE 
FOREGOING PAPER 

" Can anger and worry be entirely 
eliminated from the hum.an m.indf " 

" Yes; they are simply bad habits 
of the mind, parasites, unnatural, and 
therefore uncivilized conditions, nursed 
by false ideas of pride or necessity; and 
their elimination is a purely mental 
process within the control of every 
intelligent person who has sufficient 
self-respect to recognize within him- 
self the reflection of the Divine 
Image." 

'^ In what does the germ cure of 
mental ills differ from the Christian 
m^ethod of repression through answer to 
prayer?'' 

" Christ clearly advocated the germ 

47 



48 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

cure. He did not say ' Try to do un- 
to others as you would have others 
do unto you,' but ^ Do unto others,' 
etc. ' Be ye perfect as your Father in 
Heaven is perfect.' In all of his 
teachings do and be were the com- 
mands. Most of the creeds, however, 
endow man with a weakness which 
is self-condemning. The prayers are 
offered perfunctorily, and sometimes 
without belief in their efficacy, while 
the passions are nursed privately in 
full belief that they are essential attri- 
butes of fallen man." 

^^ May not the elimination of anger 
and worry take away some of the stimu- 
lation to effort that is necessary to human 
progress?'' 

'' Assuredly not. The absence of 
anger and worry is an evidence of 
strength and not of weakness. So- 
called righteous anger is a weakness in 
the presence of judicial calm. Without 
anger and worry one is stronger to 
ward off a blow, administer a correc- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 49 

tion, or protect a principle. The eman- 
cipated mind is as eager for effort as a 
child is for play. (Freed from anger 
and worry one can shovel more dirt, 
plough more furrows, perform every 
duty better, and with less fatigue, than 
if under their influence." 

^'Are there examples in every-day life, 
among' every-day people, that prove the 
possibility of superiority over anger and 
worry?'' 

" Yes. Habitually profane men do 
not swear in the presence of ladies. 
Vicious men are gentle when among 
those whom they respect. The pas- 
sions are subservient to the will 
under conditions that reverence or 
fashion prescribe. If they are subser- 
vient under any conditions they can be 
controlled under all conditions, N o th i ng 
for instance, could make you angry 
while we are talking on this subject, 
because you would feel ashamed to 
show slavery to a condemned and 
unmanly weakness." 



50 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

"T/" it is possible to ^et rid of the 
depressing passions y and they are so un- 
profitable^ why has not mankind become 
emancipated long before this?'' 

" This question can best be an- 
swered by asking others. Why were a 
personal devil and witches and filmy 
ghosts considered possibilities as late 
as the beginning of this century? Why 
was human slavery believed to be a 
divine institution by the majority of 
the world's inhabitants as late as fifty 
years ago? Why are the divine right of 
kings, and the assumption that the sov- 
ereign can do no wrong, possibilities of 
the present? Why is it possible that 
a Supreme Court of the United States 
can be divided on questions of political 
significance, and the points of difference 
of opinion be in harmony with the pre- 
vious political aflfiliations of the jus- 
tices? Politics represent the selfish in 
human contact as at present managed, 
while justice is supposed to be spot- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 51 

lessly unselfish ; yet the former un- 
blushingly invades the sanctuary of the 
latter, because selfishness is held to 
be a necessity." 

*' Is not the condition of E^nancipation 
selfish? Is it not selfish not to worry 
for one s friend, even if self worry is 
eliminated? " 

'* Emphatically, no ! Emancipation 
puts one in a condition to be unselfish. 
Suppose his friend need aid or sympa- 
thy ; will worry furnish either ? With 
the extirpation of the depressing pas- 
sions comes the strength, and the abil- 
ity, and the desire, to give to others, 
the aid and sympathy they may be in 
need of. Actual, or even metaphori- 
cal, wringing of hands, is not the sort 
of sympathy that soothes. It is like 
the ** blind leading the blind," or rather, 
the weak trying to assist the weak. 
Better try to help with the strength 
born of Emancipation than with the 
weakness of the enervating passions." 

" / can easily understand how anger 



52 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

can be classed as a sin, because it is 
aggressive and affects something outside 
of us; as a sin^ I can see how it ought to 
be cast out; but as worry deals only with 
one s selfy I do not believe it can be 
called a sin ; then why is it necessary to 
eliminate ity especially as it m,ay be an 
incentive to action ^ to prevent the causes 
of the worry? " 

** This whole question has been an- 
swered before in the presentation of 
the theory, but as it has not carried 
the force of impression that I intended, 
I will take it up piecemeal, and try to 
be more clear. 

'* In the first place, one's first duty is 
to one's self in the matter of cultiva- 
tion and care ; this, not on account of 
egotism or selfishness, but in order to 
fit him to be strong and useful and a 
good member of his circle. As a 
parent, he should make himself the 
most perfect progenitor and example 
possible; as a member of Society he 
should aim to be the most able and 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 53 

useful; and as the custodian of the 
Divine Essence within him, he should 
not harbor or encourage weeds of the 
soul, whether visible to others, or with- 
in the secret corners of his own 
heart. 

" As to worry ever being an incentive 
to wise or good action, I will repeat a 
section of the theory. * Worry's pro- 
phesies are seldom realized, and if they 
are, the realization is generally caused 
by the worry itself.'" 

^' How can emancipation be secured 
for the community?'' 

" Through the influence of the eman- 
cipated individual; chiefly through the 
influence of the emancipated woman. In 
the crossing of sabers she cannot assist; 
but in a war against the enemies of the 
mind, when love is the weapon, she 
can and will occupy a place in the 
front rank. She can make anger and 
worry unfashionable, as she already has 
made profanity and obscenity unfash- 
ionable. 



54 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

"To accomplish this, let clubs be 
formed in each community and in each 
church, and let each church become a 
club-house as well. Introduce health- 
ful amusements such as make other 
clubs attractive, and place in large 
letters over the portal and the altar 

GROV^TH 

EMANCIPATION 

HELP. 

You will have then constantly before 
you the only cure for mental cancers, 
and the essence of all religions ex- 
pressed in three words ; you will have 
touched the button of the Divine cam- 
era within you whose film is sensitive 
only to the rays of good. Love and 
growth will do the rest. The teachers 
of morality and religion will do abler 
work under the realization that not 
only the 'old Adam,' but the Divine 
Essence as well, have seats in each 
human soul, and that, when the good 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 55 

is appealed to in terms of confidence 
and understanding, evil will be cast out 
instantly, without a lifetime of contro- 
versy, and without waiting for eternity, 
or even for the death-bed to unloose 
the fetters. 

As a result of organization on 
the basis of Emancipation, and when 
it has become an accepted fact that 
anger and worry are only bad habits 
of the mind, no clergyman can show 
them and retain the respect of his 
congregation ; no King's Daughter 
can entertain them and be worthy of 
her badge ; no member of the Christ- 
ian Endeavor Society can harbor 
within himself the arch enemies of 
Christianity which the Master com- 
manded his disciples to cast out, and 
be loyal to his cause ; and no individual 
in the pursuit of duty, or even of sel- 
fish pleasure, can afford to carry such 
weighty handicaps and hope to win the 
race." 



PLYMOUTH CHURCH CLUB 

AND 

ARMOUR INSTITUTE 



PLYMOUTH CHURCH CLUB AND 
ARMOUR INSTITUTE 

A good example of a church club 
is that which forms a part of Plymouth 
Church in Chicago. Plymouth Club 
was founded by Dr. Scudder and is 
warmly encouraged by Dr. Frank W. 
Gunsaulus, the present pastor of the 
church. Dr. Gunsaulus is also presi- 
dent of Armour Institute, where man- 
ual training is taught side by side with 
letters and the sciences to men and 
women alike. In these two eminently 
practical organizations most of the 
conditions favorable to growth are 
already furnished. Add to these 
Emancipation as the motto of the 
club, and as the requisite mental ac- 
complishment for admission to the 
school, and the conditions will be per- 
fected to the highest degree. 

59 



6o MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

The word Emancipation has a very 
formidable sound because it is asso- 
ciated with a great war; but its attain- 
ment through germ eradication is a 
simple and easy accomplishment. 

The presidents of great mental and 
manual training institutions know that 
the depressing and dwarfing phantoms 
of the mind are merely bad habits — 
weeds that can be rooted out — and 
that anger and worry are the roots. 

They have provided commodious 
buildings, learned professors, the most 
perfect chemical and mechanical appli- 
ances, and thousands of books, to aid 
mental and manual culture; and yet, 
they fail to apply the first principle of 
all their sciences to the preparation of 
the pupil. In horticulture they do not 
tolerate worms or weeds; in chemistry 
they first examine into the purity of 
the ingredients; and in mechanics the 
greatest care is taken to avoid friction. 
\ Anger and worry are conditions of ex- 
treme mental friction, which, during 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 6 1 

their presence, stop the progressive 
action of the mental machine. 

It would impose no impossibility, 
neither would it entail any hardship, 
to require of students that they should 
subscribe to the following: 

Science teaches, and experience corrob- 
orates the facty that the depressing or 
evil passions are bad habits of the mind, 
and not necessary ingredients. 

Anger and worry are the roots of the 
evil passions and can be pulled out. 

In order to promote the best possible 
growth it is required that Emancipation 
should be the rule of life of the student. 

Under the suggestion of the possi- 
bility of Emancipation from undesira- 
ble mental enemies, emanating from 
so respected a source as the faculty 
of a chosen college, the student would 
acquire the prerequisite condition of 
"faith" ; while the absorbing work of 
college life, surrounded by fellows 
working in sympathy with him, would 
strengthen the faith into a belief; and 



62 MENTICULTURE 

the immediate recompense of harmony 
would be evidence of its value as a 
rule of life. 

From the school the student would 
carry the rule back into the family, and 
into all walks in life; and with the aid 
of present means of communication 
the influence would spread the world 
over, disarm the prodigious prepara- 
tions for struggle that are being made, 
and distribute the palm branch to take 
the place of the sword. 

Will not the great educators whom 
the world respects so highly, and in 
whom it has so much faith, try the 
experiment? The promised fruit is 
worth the trial. 



DIAGNOSIS AND REMEDY 



DIAGNOSIS AND REMEDY 

It is believed by many, that Society 
and Politics, at the present time, are 
badly diseased. Mr. Max Nordau's 
diagnosis of them, which he entitled 
De£;eneration^ has met with general 
approval. Legislative (especially mu- 
nicipal) corruption, and the degrada- 
tion of some of the courts, are open 
evidence of the fact. Statesmanship 
and Politics have been divorced, and 
are already strangers to each other. 
The marriage of Might and Right, has 
been sanctioned by popular consent. 
Power is no longer used as a lever with 
which to uplift the weak, but has been 
transformed into a social crushing ma- 
chine. Caste, ostentation, dissipation, 
and insincerity, are the established 
idols that lure the present generation 
towards greedy ambition. 

65 



66 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

It is also believed, and is perhaps 
true, that the social ulcers have been 
so irritated by ostentatious rivalry, and 
the commercial ulcers are so distended 
with the pus of ruinous competition 
and corruption, that they must soon 
come to a head, and that convalescence 
and cure may be possibilities of the 
future. 

While these symptoms of disease 
are visible to all, and are tolerated as 
necessary evils, they fortunately do not 
cover the whole body politic; but yet, 
they seriously disfigure its face, and 
grievously affect the healthy action of 
its heart. 

In the political world, many agents 
are actively at work to effect cure of 
the evils which flaunt unblushing in the 
face of the public. The Committee of 
Seventy in New York, The Civic Fed- 
eration in Chicago, and the National 
Municipal Reform League of the United 
States, are all doing good temporary 
work, but thev do not reach the root 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 67 

causes of the evils they aim to correct; 
and it is doubtful if the reforms they 
accomplish will be any more permanent 
than were those of their equally zeal- 
ous predecessors. 

In the moral and religious world, 
much the same futile methods of cure 
through repression are in use that ob- 
tained during the Dark Middle Ages. 

In the individual, phantoms of the 
imagination, whose presence impose 
stagnation and disease, are created 
and clothed with the authority of mas- 
ters, under the belief that they are the 
curses which bind fallen men to earth ; 
and this in contradiction of every 
assurance and promise of Christ ; in 
opposition to all intelligent methods 
of culture used in connection with ani- 
mals and plants ; and contrary to com- 
mon sense. 

These are strong statements, but 
they are indisputable ; and if they are 
true, what then, is the remedy? 

As previously stated, the only cure is 



68 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

the germ cure; and, beginning with the 
individual. 

The task is not a difficult one. 
Appreciation of the limitations of the 
power of the depressing passions, and 
one's strength to extirpate them, and 
to be superior to them, are the only- 
necessary prerequisites to victory. 
There is no tedious discipline, as in the 
various methods of repression in 
vogue; and dividends are immediately 
and continuously collectable on the 
fair face of the investment. No rule 
of conduct is necessary; for, out of 
Emancipation, only good conduct, to fit 
environing circumstances, can be ex- 
pected ; and yet, every Christian, every 
Jew, every Buddhist, every Moham- 
metan, every Free Mason, and every 
Odd Fellow, can accept Emancipation 
as a rule of life, without renouncing 
his other faiths and affiliations, be- 
cause it is the fundamental principle of 
them all, expressed in terms of present 
knowledge, and unclouded by the 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 69 

shadows of ignorance and superstition, 
which gave the name of Dark Ages to 
a period of our history. 

And outside of these devotees, 
there is the great mass of men, the so- 
called Skeptics, who claim to adhere 
to logic, and scientific sense, for their 
light on spiritual, as well as on material 
subjects. To these, Emancipation will 
be a haven of repose for their spirit- 
ual yearnings; and, unimpeded growth, 
under Divinely natural conditions, 
"will do the rest" for them all. 



PRESCRIPTION 



PRESCRIPTION 

One grain of the assurance of Christ 
that man is made in the image of God. 

One grain of respect for the respon- 
sibility of the care and culture of the 
Divine Essence with which we have 
been entrusted. 

One grain of the command of Christ 
(implying a possibility) '' Be ye per- 
fect, as your Father in Heaven is per- 
fect." 

One grain of the example of Buddha 
that man can grow to perfection through 
the elimination of anger and worry 
and their brood of dependent pas- 
sions. 

One grain of the wisdom of Aris- 
totle which declared that the passions 
are habits of the mind, and can be got- 
ten rid of as physical habits are gotten 
rid of. 

73 



74 MENTICULTURE 

One grain of the assurance of Omar 
Khayyam that Heaven and Hell are 
within ourselves. 

One grain of the assurance of Christ 
that " the Kingdom of Heaven is at 
hand." 

One grain of common sense applied 
to an analysis of mental handicaps and 
the discovery of their limitations. 

One grain of the to-day experience 
of the author that anger and worry are 
the roots of all the passions which de- 
press, and can be eliminated. 

DIRECTIONS. 

Take: and then let 

The ever-full, never-full bounty of love, 
Sing a song, tell a tale, strike a chord, from above, 
Soften strife out of life, find a pleasure in giving, 
Sound the kev-note on earth, of the Art of True Living. 



SCRAPS OF EVIDENCE 



SCRAPS OF EVIDENCE 

Early in life I was fortunate enough 
to acquire the belief that, what seemed 
to be the consensus of opinion of the 
learned in any art or science, ought 
to be true; and, accepting their dictum, 
I have tried to grow up to an appre- 
ciation of their intelligence or taste 
in the subjects of their study, without 
combatting it with my own callow im- 
pressions. In this way I have enjoyed 
an early appreciation of the classics 
in music and in art, much in advance of 
the ordinary experience derived from 
personal contact. In this spirit of in- 
vestigation I have collected some 
scraps of evidence which all prove my 
theory. No one has denied the possi- 
bility of Emancipation, but every one 
has found a pleasure at once in the ray 
of hope it suggests. 

Since my attention has been direct- 
n 



78 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

ed to the possible total emancipation 
from the depressing passions, I have 
taken occasion to interview every man 
who seemed to enjoy unclouded hap- 
piness, as to the secret of his happi- 
ness. In almost every instance I have 
learned that the emancipated condi- 
tion has dated, not from infancy and 
inheritance, but from some incident in 
later life that exposed the passions to 
ridicule, or showed them to be a cause 
of danger; such as death as the result 
of worry, or crime as the result of 
anger ; some object lesson which 
proved the danger of permitting the 
passions to absorb one. I enquired of 

A PHYSICIAN 

who has recently been selected by 
vote of the members of his profes- 
sion to a position of honor among 
them, and who is conspicuous for 
his enjoyment of such healthful recrea- 
tion as only much younger men usu- 
ally enjoy, whether he did not consider 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 79 

anger and worry habits of the mind, 
and not as necessary ingredients. "Cer- 
tainly," said he, ''and I know it to be 
true by the best possible evidence, the 
evidence of experience." After some 
further questioning I was able to get 
from him the following story: *' When 
I was a boy I had an ungovernable 
temper which brought from my neigh- 
bors the prediction that I would come 
to some bad end. At school I was 
known as one of the four or five 
'roosters.' There was scarcely a day 
that a ring was not formed, and some 
of us 'roosters' did not engage in a 
fight. I followed my studies pretty 
closely, however, in pursuance of a 
natural inclination to be 'on top,' but 
without any laudable ambition in con- 
nection with them, and finally gradu- 
ated in medicine and began practice. 
I suffered great annoyance from horses 
and servants, and quarreled with them 
constantly, and got mad at my patients 
if they showed any unreasonable ten- 



8o MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

dencies; until one day it came to me 
as a sudden revelation, that, what most 
hindered them from getting well, was 
the very thing that possessed me the 
greater part of the time, and made me 
disagreeable to myself and others; and 
I resolved to master myself as I had 
tried to master others. From that 
time I date my success in life, and 
certainly my happiness. I will not al- 
low anything to worry me. If a driver 
or other servant does not please me, 
I do not quarrel with him, but pay 
him off, and let him go with the best 
of feeling. I have a collector who is 
very faithful, and very candid at the 
same time. When he fails to collect 
an account that is due, I sometimes 
ask him the reason, and he repeats to 
me what my patient has said. One 
day I questioned him about an account 
that had been long overdue, against 
a patient whom I met cordially every 
day at the club, but who was evidently 
* short' at the time and suffered annoy- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 8l 

ance from collectors. 'What did he ^ 
say?' said I. 'He said, sir, "Tell the 
doctor to go to hell," r.epli£d^iheJtii3inest: 
collector, ^ost men would have takeii^ 
^jffense at the message, and prosecuted 
his patient for the debt, or 'cut' him, 
or expressed anger in some way; but I 
simply didn't go where he had ordered, 
and never referred to the matter with 
him. We are the best of friends now, 
and he is one of my warmest advo- 
cates." 



-:2rl^ANUFACTURER 

The president of one of the largest 
manufacturing corporations in the 
country, having properties in a dozen 
states, related to me the following 
story : 

"Some years ago I journeyed south 
with a railroad magnate who stood 
very high at the time in the railway 
world. We came to a river crossed 
by his road. The bridge had been 
washed away, and, while it was rebuild- 



f 




82 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

ing, trains were ferried to the further 
shores. Owing to some accident there 
was no boat on hand to transport the 
official's car across the stream. He 
became so angry that he flew into a 
wild passion, and cursed and dis- 
charged the subordinates in charge of 
the division without inquiry as to the 
cause of the delay. He learned after- 
ward that the accident to the boat 
was unavoidable, and that none of the 
employes whom he had insulted so 
grossly and discharged so unfairly 
were responsible for it ; but he was too 
proud to apologize. 

"The incident made such an impres- 
sion on me, that I resolved never to 
show anger again before my em- 
ployes; and I have kept my resolve. 
It has led to my renouncing the habit 
altogether, and for many years anger 
has ceased to be a component part 
of my nature. I am sorry that I did not 
discharge worry at the same time, as 
results have proved that it has had 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 83 

no real cause to exist; and it has, as 
you say, stolen much precious time 
and energy out of my life." 

A MADMAN 

Another example of the possible 
control of the passions, and a most 
important one, is told by another 
friend. One of the chums of his 
youth had fits of anger during which 
he was possessed with an insatiable 
desire to kill the object of his wrath, if 
it happened to be a living being, or to 
break it if it were inanimate. During 
his seasons of calm he deplored his 
weakness, and resolved not to permit 
it to take possession of him. He 
stopped being angry because he was 
afraid of the consequences. He did 
not dare to be angry. As a result he 
has lived a life filled with charity and 
consideration for others, which has 
been a blessing to himself and those 
about him. 



84 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

MR. DANA 

Mr. Charles A. Dana once sent a 
member of the staff of the New York 
Sun to learn, if possible, what was 
the probable cause of the death of 
some men of high standing in the 
financial world who were reported to 
have hastened their death by over- 
work. Mr. Dana did not believe that 
hard work could kill. The result of 
the inquiry in each instance was to 
the effect that these men were the 
victims of worry, which was as unne- 
cessary, as it was unprofitable and fatal. 

AN AUTHOR 

One of the most prolific, observing, 
and interesting writers of stories and 
descriptive articles for the magazines, 
a war correspondent and one time jour- 
nalist, has endorsed and practiced the 
theory presented in this paper, and has 
done me the honor to write approv- 
ingly as follows : 

"I have succeeded in entirely rid- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 85 

ding myself of the cancers, and am 
amazed at the ease with which it was 
done. You are certainly an apostle of 
sweetness and light, and I shall never 
be able to thank you enough for letting 
me into your noble secret." 

He notes especially an improved 
digestion, and feels younger each day 
as he progresses in the new life. 

A GENERAL MANAGER 

The Southern General Manager of 
one of the largest British Insurance 
Companies is a tried convert, and finds 
health and happiness which had never 
been attained while under the thraldom 
of worry, which was his only former 
affliction. 

AN AUTHORESS 

The author of a novel which has just 
come before the public, and which 
is one of the purest and most ingenious 
stories ever published, is an ardent con- 
vert to the belief that she is superior 
to the depressing passions, and her 



86 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

naturally religious temperament finds 
great solace in it. 

A LAWYER 

A leading lawyer of New Orleans, 
of very old family, religious by nature, 
but not sectarian, found comfort in the 
idea of the possible elimination of the 
passions, and the unrestricted growth 
of the God-given faculties, in substance 
as follows : 

"The germ theory of cure must ap- 
peal to all persons in a greater or less 
degree, especially to such as find it dif- 
ficult to believe in a personal Deity who 
receives directly and directly answers 
prayer as a special dispensation. They 
can find logic in the cultivation of the 
Divine Spark which has been breathed 
in to them, and feel that in its growth 
toward perfection the Laws of Nature 
are being assisted and not violated ; 
while to such as find faith in a personal 
God and comfort and help in prayer, 
the ability to be superior to sinful 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 87 

thoughts will give stimulation to their 
faith, and be a fulfilment of the Ex- 
ample, which taught : 'Get thee behind 
me^ Satan f 

A SOUTHRON 

I was traveling with a friend from 
the South who is one of the best fel- 
lows that I know. He is kind, consid- 
erate, chivalrous, and all that char- 
acterizes a Southern gentleman; but he 
has a false idea of dignity in some re- 
spects, and precipitates controversy 
sometimes without cause, and when he 
himself is to blame in the matter. We 
were discussing the theory of Emanci- 
pation, and he agreed with me on almost 
all of the points at issue, in fact to such 
an extent that I felt that he absorbed 
the idea fully, when he said: ''Yes, 
it is true, and I believe in it, and I 
think I have practiced it somewhat ; 
but I can't stand impertinence from 
niggers ; they rub up against me all 
the time, and annoy me terribly, espe- 



88 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

cially these Pullman porters." "Yes," 
said I in reply, " you have attained 
pretty good self-control and have rea- 
son to be proud of it ; you are pretty 
nearly a perfect man ; the only thing 
you are not superior to is a nigger." 
The rebuke impressed him as a truism 
that had never occurred to him in that 
light before. 

The truth of the matter is, and I 
have had both experiences to prove it 
to my own satisfaction, antagonism in- 
vites antagonism. A fostered dislike 
or an anticipated friction sends out a 
shaft in advance which rebounds and 
rebounds with quickening vibrations. 
If one is looking for impertinence from 
any source he will be pretty sure to 
find it; but if he carries a mind and 
heart free from prejudice, which is the 
condition of Emancipation, the shaft 
will not be unloosed, and the disturb- 
ing vibrations will not occur. I do not 
believe that Pullman porters were ever 
discourteous to Phillips Brooks, or Ed- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 89 

ward Everett Hale, or Professor Swing 
or men of their caliber of mind; or if 
they were, I do not believe that the 
impertinence made any impression on 
them except to excite pity. 

FEAR DISPELLED 

The most remarkable evidence in 
support of my theory that fear is dis- 
pelled with worry, and which corrob- 
orates my own experience, comes from 
an old friend who once had a shock 
from a stroke of lightning, and who, 
on account of it, has for years suffered 
wretchedly from a depression akin to 
involuntary fear whenever the weather 
has indicated an approaching storm. 
He has accepted the possibility of 
Emancipation and enjoyed deliver- 
ance from the passions, but strangely 
enough has also now immunity from 
any uncomfortable feeling during elec- 
tric storms. 



50 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 
TIMIDITY DISAPPEARS 

Another convert states that he has 
lost all timidity, in the presence of an 
audience, which formerly he could not 
overcome. 

THOMSON J. HUDSON 

Mr. Thomson J.Hudson, in his Law 
of Psychic Phenomena, has marshalled a 
great array of authentic evidence, 
gathered from the researches of many 
Psychological Societies, which all 
prove the power of the mind over 
itself and over the body, and its 
amenability to suggestion, under the 
receptive condition of faith. One can 
not read this able work without becom- 
ing convinced that Emancipation is 
entirely possible. Any one who wishes 
to learn something of the power stored 
within him, will do well to read the 
Law of Psychic Phenomena. 

The success of the Keeley Cure in 
conquering the habits of drinking, 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 9 1 

opium, and tobacco, is proof of the 
efficacy of germ treatment where the 
germs are sensual, or mental. If bi- 
chloride of gold can cure such dread 
passions of the appetite, may not bi- 
chloride of comfnon sense cure the bad 
habits of the mind that cause them? 

A MASTER WORKMAN 

And now, comes a scrap of evi- 
dence that is valuable because it is 
furnished by a man whose experience 
is wide among the people who make 
the wealth which we all enjoy; to 
whom we are directly indebted for 
the comforts and luxuries of life ; 
and whose endorsement of an idea 
or reform is necessary to make it be- 
come a feature of our system or 
government. He went west many 
years ago from New York, a mechanic 
by trade, and found employment in 
the shops of one of the great rail- 
roads. In time he was advanced 
to the position of foreman. In private 



92 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

life he is now a Baron Bountiful 
in the service of everybody within 
his reach. As Masterworkman of La- 
bor Organizations, he has urged the 
just cause of his confreres with the 
success that follows earnest conviction. 
In the intimate confidence of his em- 
ployers, he has presented their side of 
a controversy to the men without any of 
the misrepresentation of a demagogue. 
He is the President of a sound 
Building and Loan Association, with- 
out salary, not to make money for him- 
self, but for the purpose of helping his 
men to build and own homes; and 
those who have felt his assistance in 
that direction, and owe him debts of 
gratitude for various benefactions, are 
numbered by the hundreds. When- 
ever there is sickness, he brings solid 
help and the sunniest of comfort; and 
when there is death, he knows just how 
best to serve the afflicted family with 
those delicate attentions which relieve 
them from repulsively material de- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 93 

tails, his presence always bringing com- 
fort even under circumstances in which 
people want most to be alone. His 
sympathy is universal, and reflects Itself 
into the hearts of all with whom he 
comes in contact. 

To such a man, one would naturally 
think the depressing passions were 
strangers, and that he must have been 
born without them; but he assures me 
that he was a slave to them for many 
years, and that he was frightened out of 
harboring them by a physician, and that 
whatever good he has accomplished in 
his humble sphere (as he calls it) he 
attributes to the partial Emancipation 
which his doctor's warning led him to 
enforce upon himself. The story that 
follows was elicited on hearing an out- 
line of the theory of possible Emanci- 
pation as presented in these pages. 

''Stop right there: don't go any 
farther till I have talked with you about 
that part of it. It Is as true as gospel, 
but I never knew what It was. I have 



94 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

had an experience which makes me 
know that it is true, but I didn't know 
the reason for it. When the doctors 
told me that I must quit worrying and 
take it easy, or medicine would do me 
no good, and I would die, why didn't 
they tell me that anger and worry were 
not necessary, and that it was they that 
I was suffering from? I would have 
understood it better, and I wouldn't 
'have had so much trouble about fearing 
! jl would have them back some time in 
spite of myself. Why didn't the preach- 
ers tell me this when I was a boy, and 
let me begin to live then, instead of 
waiting till I got to be an old man or 
pretty near to it? You can bet that 
my boys will know this thing right 
away, and live it too, and I want my 
men to know it. It is the only thing 
they need to complete their happiness. 
The old gentleman needs it, and Mr. — , 

and Mr . (mentioning a number of 

well known men who are their own 
worst enemies, who harm no one but 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 95 

themselves, but whose abuse of self, 
through worry, is as merciless as the 
tortures of the Inquisition); and what a 
blessing it would be for the women! 
See here, I want a hundred of those 
books as soon as they are published, 
and I knoAv where they will do a heap 
of good. They will be better than the 
medicine of all the doctors, and do a 
lot of good besides. Fm going to com- 
mit what you have told me to memory, 
so as to tell people about it if I haven't 
got a book by me. You see that I 
know all about this, for I have had an 
experience. When I was a youngster, 
I was naturally ambitious, and pretty 

smart with the tools, and 'took' with 
my employers, and finally got to be 

superintendent. Then I got to be more 
ambitious, especially after I was married 
and the children came. I wanted them 
to have a good education and be fitted 
to be gentlemen, which I knew their 
mother's, and I might remark incident- 
ally, my own blood entitled them to be. 



96 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

I was pretty sensitive, and was always 
standing up for my rights. I was too 
apt to worry. I had not heard what 
you have told me and thought worry 
necessary. If I had not worried I 
would not have got angry. 

*' When I got to be superintendent I 
thought that one of the things that I 
had to do was to be sure and maintain 
my dignity, and show it by occasion- 
ally making believe mad at something. 
At first I did not feel it half as much 
as I showed it ; but I thought it 
was part of the business of a boss 
to get mad, until finally it got to be 
a habit, and grew on me till I was in a 
state of anger most of the time. I 
also thought that I had to worry about 
things, or I would not show the proper 
respect for my responsibilities. It was 
the way I had of letting myself feel that 
I was carrying a terrible burden and 
I earning my salary. The trouble was 
I that, while it was partly play-acting at 
f first, it came to be habit, and worked on 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 97 

my health in the end. The doctors 
dosed me with all sorts of medicine. I 
was a regular pigeon, and gave up many 
a hard-earned dollar to them for no 

good at all. One day Dr. L , to 

whom I went as a last resort, for I was 
beginning to have dizzy spells and 
twitching in the face that was serious, 
asked me a lot of questions about 
myself and my habits and duties. I 
told him frankly, and when I had done 
so he said : * There is no use giving 
you any medicine, you have got to quit 
worrying and take it easy ; that is the 
only trouble with you. If you keep on 
with your worry I will have to give 
your family a certificate of death; so, if 
you don't want me to do that, you just 
quit your worrying and take life easy. 
Whatever you do, don't get into fits of 
anger, for that is more wearing to a 
man in your condition than anything 
else.' Well, to 'fess up and tell you 
the truth, I got frightened out of my 
wits. I hadn't got near enough to 



98 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

eighty (my limit) to think about dying, 
and I didn't want to do it right then, 
especially as I hadn't got Mary and 
the boys well enough fixed to leave. 
The other doctors had made a monkey 
of me, and took my money, and told 
me that I would be all right in a few 
days ; but this honest German told me 
the truth and set me to thinking. I 
didn't say a word to anyone, but made 
up my mind I would take his advice. 
At first I thought that I was shirking 
some of the duties of a superintendent, 
when I quit getting mad and worrying; 
but I squared it with myself by saying 
to myself, ' Better be a tame donkey 
for the company than a dead one.' 
Well, I didn't know it at the time ; 
that is, I didn't know the cause of it, 
but from that time I have just had 
luck under my wing all the time. I 
have pleased my employers, and I have 
pleased the men, and things have been 
coming my way in great shape, and 
they are still a-coming. Why, I see it 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING QQ 

all as plain as the nose on your face. 
Those little devils that keep a man 
back, and keep him from being happy, 
have no business there by rights; and all 
you have got to know is that they are 
poachers, and all you have got to do is 
to tell them to 'git.' And just see how 
it would work if everybody knew this 
as I see it. If you knew that your 
neighbor knew that Emancipation was 
possible, you would know at the same 
time that he was no fool, and that, 
knowing it, he had become Emanci- 
pated, of course, and there would be a 
trustful sympathy established at once, 
and you would pull together and never 
apart after that. If his fence accidentally 
encroached an inch on your land, you 
would be glad of it; or, if your fence 
had been set on his side of the legal 
line, he would not object; and so it 
would go on between you, and you 
would be happy and good neighbors to 
each other. Why, I would rather my 
men would have that secret and day's 



• , c <^ 



lOO MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

I jwages, than a million of dollars without 
/ |it ; and my boys, if I don't leave them a 
/ /cent, I will leave them full of this secret, 
and won't worry about their future hap- 
piness. I was much interested in that 
book you gave me several years ago 
called * Looking Backward.' What the 
author said about co-operation, and all 
that, was all right and very beautiful; 
but I didn't take much stock in it be- 
cause I had such a poor opinion of 
human nature, that I didn't think peo- 
ple could quit grabbing and get down 
to brass tacks in a co-operative way. 
But if you can spread the idea of Men- 
tal Emancipation as you have told it to 
me (and I don't see what can help its 
spreading like wildfire as soon as it 
gets out), the social paradise pictured 
in ' Looking Backward ' will come as 
a matter of course ; and I see it a-com- 
ing If you take off a brake I can see 
how a car can run down a hill, but 
with the brake on I couldn't see how 
you could push it down. 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING lOI 

"The more I think of this thing the 
bigger it gets, and it is a sure winner. 
Now suppose my family, and the B. 
family on the corner, and the N. family 
next door had found out the secret, 
anybody that couldn't grasp it couldn't 
live in the street, he would feel so un- 
comfortable. In fact, if there were such 
an one, we could put him down for a 
crazy man or an idiot, and treat him 
with the same consideration we treat 
such weak people. 

" Or suppose the men over in the 
shops were the joint possessors of the 
secret; why, the first thing you would 
know they would all be at work on 
some co-operative plan for themselves. 
Not that any of us have anything 
against the employers we work for, for 
there are no better in the land; but it 
is the blamed stupidity of the system 
that makes men work hard for small 
wages to feed the flames of ruinous 
rivalry. Look at the brains locked up 
in the pates of lawyers which have 



I02 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

nothing better to do than to mix things 
up so that they will get the job of un- 
mixing them. Think what would hap- 
pen if all that education and all that in- 
genuity were turned towards invention! 
Most of the tangles they are employed 
to unravel should never have existed, 
and would not have existed in a com- 
munity where the secret of Emancipa- 
tion had been told. In all of the clum- 
siness of competition, and the expense 
of pullback methods, labor, the source 
of all we have, pays the whole freight 
in one way or another; and the reason 
it does so is because of the little par- 
asite devils that are sawing wood and 
hatching eggs in the minds of each 
individual worker and producer. With 
these little devils at work in him he is 
suspicious, selfish, jealous, and what 
not else, because he thinks his neighbor 
and fellow workman are similarly pos- 
sessed, and he must be so too to get 
along. Under this condition cohesion 
is impossible, and schemers prey upon 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 1 03 

the separateness of the producing com- 
munity to rob it of as much of the 
product of its labor as possible. Suppose 
that the secret of possible Emancipa- 
tion should become general (and for 
the life of me I cannot see how it can 
fail to do so), there would be confidence, 
trustfulness, cohesion, ambition to be 
useful, and the energy of the healthy 
child for play-work would return to the 
rejuvenated man, and he would play 
work under those conditions and not 
feel that it was a mark of servitude 
and necessity, and the land would sing 
with the sound of willing industry." 

My friend had become eloquent under 
the inspiration of the possible estab- 
lishment of a Heaven on earth to which 
he could invite his friends. Do not 
think that this is not a true report of 
a conversation in real life. My friend 
is a real character; is well read and 
educated by observation and exper- 
ience, and could succeed in almost 
any position in life except in such as 



I04 MENTI CULTURE; OR, THE 

did not give 'Value received" for the 
service rendered. He is one of those 
"Noblemen by Nature" to whom the 
world owes so much, but pays so little; 
but he is happy in doing good, and the 
field he works in is one of the richest 
for that harvest, and the compensation 
he prizes most highly, is the happiness 
he is able to give others. He had 
the secret of True Living forced on 
him, in spite of the example of the 
world, without knowing the true cause 
or value of his good fortune; but his 
happiness was increased many fold 
when he learned that it was his birth- 
right; was a possession of which no 
one could rob him; and would re- 
main his as long as he lived. And as 
he has faith in the Eternal Evolution of 
everything, he feels that, freed from the 
depressing passions, there will be no 
end to his growth; that, at the so-called 
middle age of human tenure, he is but in 
the beginning of life; or, if not that, 
that each day is a wealth of joy unto 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 1 05 

itself in spite of any external conditions; 
for he has found that ''the kingdom of 
Heaven is at hand" and that a branch 
of it has been established in his own 
heart. 

All men are not constituted alike. 
In the economy of Nature it is her pur- 
pose that no two things are made alike. 
In a million years a million men could 
not count the spears of grass in the 
fields, or the hairs of the heads of men; 
yet no patient investigator has been 
able to find any two of them that did not 
differ from every other one when put 
under the lens of the microscope One 
thousand millions of humans inhabit 
this earth. Each has essentially the 
same form, the same two eyes, the 
same mouth, the same ears and hands 
and arms; and yet even in the case of 
twins, where the nearest approach to 
similarity comes, the mother never can 
mistake the one for the other. If 
you are unlike others, it is because na- 
ture chose to cast you in a different 



I06 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

mould to serve some wise purpose; and 
with that form, comes the God-given 
essence of the Divine, whose presence 
and growth are evidenced by an innate 
yearning for spirituality. Much spir- 
ituality lifts a man above his less 
spiritual fellows and makes of him a 
cornerstone, or a keystone, or some 
other important segment of the so- 
cial structure; and lack of it con- 
demns him to be a bit of rubble, 
or an atom of filling. The corner- 
stones and the keystones help and 
support each other in the stately arch, 
while the rubble and the atoms fall 
apart and become dirt, when allowed 
to find their level. Which shall we 
choose to become: the keystone of the 
arch, or some of the dirt of the earth 
beneath it? Which shall we choose: 
happiness, health, growth, usefulness, 
rest, and a fitting relationship to the 
Divine, or the reverse? Each is what 
God made him plus what he can attain 
by growth. Through eradication of 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING T07 

the cankerous passions; through the 
extirpation of the mental weeds; the 
dwarf may grow to be greater than the 
king; and all can freely and fully enjoy 
life and growth, when they have learned 
the A-B-C of True Living. The 
grammar, and the rhetoric, and the 
poetry, and perhaps a higher intelli- 
gence than we know of now may fol- 
low, and are sure to follow; but they 
will be but brighter phases of hap- 
piness already attained. 

A CHURCHWOMAN 

In searching for corroborative evi- 
dence of the possibility of Emancipa- 
tion, I was fortunate in meeting a lady 
whose acquaintance with the several re- 
ligions and metaphysics is exceptional ; 
and whose clear intelligence regarding 
the value of menticulture, makes her a 
rare critic in questions of this kind. 
From her I received the most valued en- 
couragement. She is a devout church- 
woman, but has studied along the sev- 



Io8 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

eral lines of psychology in search of 
additional light and strength. She 
had read my simple presentation of 
the theory of germ cure, and found in 
it a ray of hope, the effect of which 
she described as follows: "The sensa- 
tion that was produced in me by the 
suggestion, I cannot describe. It was 
as if a great flood of light had burst 
upon me, and I saw the possibility of 
an immediate realization of my spiritual 
ideal; and I have prayed to God con- 
stantly, that it may not leave me* 
There have been unusual occasions for 
worry and annoyance since then. I 
have just moved to a new city ; into a 
new house; and my husband and I are 
beginning life anew in an untried field. 
All of my past associations are broken 
up, and new sympathies among stran- 
gers are to be formed. My husband's 
health has been poor, and mine has 
been wretched, so that we have been 
compelled to seek climates more favor- 
able, at the expense of financial con- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING lOQ 

siderations; yet, the cloud that hung 
over our prospects has been miracu- 
lously dispelled, and my days and 
nights are soothed with a calm con- 
tentment and happiness which I have 
never known before. My religion 
seems more precious to me than ever. 
It seems as if one simple little ingre- 
dient that it lacked has been found ; 
and that now it is perfect. I have 
always been possessed of a desire to 
accomplish one act in life which should 
be conspicuous for its usefulness to 
some one ; and if I can ever succeed 
in giving to one person the light and 
comfort that this revelation has given 
to me, I shall feel that my ambition 
has been attained." 

Her discovery of a simple little in- 
gredient, in the theory of germ cure, 
led to a new appreciation of the idea 
of simplicity in connection with it, 
which has been amplified in the suc- 
ceeding chapter. 



FIRST PRINCIPLES OVER- 
LOOKED 



FIRST PRINCIPLES OVERLOOKED 



Simplicity and harmony are the 
ultimate conditions to be attained in 
all things. In literature, and in music, 
and in oratory, and in painting, and in 
mechanics, and in life, simplicity is at 
once the greatest charm, and the best 
evidence of merit. In mechanics, a 
simple little device usually perfects the 
great labor-saving machine. In chem- 
istry, a simple little ingredient may give 
culminating power to a world-building 
or a world-destroying compound. In 
oratory, a simple and impassioned appeal 
is most potent to move the multitude 
to action ; and in menticulture, the 
siTnple and direct application of the germ^ 
curey may be able to effect a millennium 
in social evolution within a generation. 
Stranger things have happened ! Be- 
cause it has not happened, is no reason 

113 



If 






114 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

why it should not happen. In fact, 
there are logical reasons why the habit 
of repression should have smothered 
any idea of germ cure, till Science 
placed an analogy in physics before 
our eyes ; especially because the false 
hypothesis of original (or natural) sin, 
has been persistently advanced as a 
law of our being. 

Christ taught the germ cure, and 
hinted at no other as an alternative. 
In the sermon on the mount ; in his 
talks by the Sea of Galilee ; and in 
his rebuke of the devil in the desert, 
there was no note of indecision sug- 
gested. Do and be and get were unmis- 
takable commands. But these com- 
mands were given in a gentle manner, 
to half-doubting disciples, and faintly 
echoed by them to an incredulous 
world, that had not learned the power 
of mind over matter, or over itself; 
and hence the world waited for Science 
to prove even greater possibilities, 
before giving heed to the simple com 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 115 

mands of the Great Teacher in the 
manner he commanded. 

One of the great weaknesses of the 
age in which we live is the ignoring of 
first principles, and a reaching out for 
the remote or unattainable. In the 
matter of home responsibilities, and 
in menticulture, this is most apparent. 
The order of responsibility is — the 
mind, — the body — the mind of the 
child — the body or health of the child — 
and so on in the sequence of relation- 
ship in the family, in the community, 
in the nation, and in the world ; not 
with selfish discrimination against the 
more remote, but with zealous care of 
the nearer relationships. This order, 
however, is rarely observed. We weed 
the garden, but do not weed the mind. 
We pass laws to punish any who strike, 
or rob, or corrupt a citizen, but there 
is no law to protect the abused or neg- 
lected children of drunken or incom- 
petent parents, except in extreme 
cases. Breeders of fine animals take 



Il6 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

the greatest pains to guard all the con- 
ditions surrounding their stock, and at 
the same time encourage family alli- 
ance with consumptive plutocrats. 

The antiquated and primitive doc- 
trine of laissez faire^ has been replaced 
by those of Division of Labor, and of 
Protection, in the cases of the strong 
who have demanded them, or who 
have purchased them through leg- 
islative cupidity; but still obtains in 
the cases of the weak and non-as- 
sertive. 

The truant subjects of great nations, 
scattered in foreign lands, are hedged 
about with protection equal to an im- 
perial guard ; and thousands of men 
and millions of money are sacrificed to 
revenge an insult to, or protect the 
property of a claimant citizen at the 
Antipodes ; while hundreds and thou- 
sands of the producers at home are 
starving and dying, because of the 
maladministration of the first princi- 
ples of economies, and the laissez faire 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 117 

license given to selfish and unscrupu- 
lous competition. 

Arrogant commerce, and the al- 
ready-powerful, have no end of pro- 
tection; but the mind, the health, the 
child, and the producer, are left to 
the tender mercy of chance, or are 
hampered by crushing conditions of 
abuse and neglect contrary to every 
law of growth ; and thus it must be ; 
until we adopt the germ cure, as a 
principle of menticulture, and Eman- 
cipation, as the first evidence of intelli- 
gence and respectability. 

In self-administration, the far-away 
habit is quite as prevalent as in the 
administration of Society. Men and 
women slave and save, to furnish 
means for sending missionaries to 
India, to release the Indian mind of 
imagined evils, while they crawl about 
servile to anger or worry, or both 
anger and worry. They set their 
ideal of happiness at an indefinite 
height, always out of reach. They 



Il8 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

hide their Heaven behind the curtain 
of death, and refuse to look for it 
within the precincts of their own heart. 
They waste precious time in speculat- 
ing as to the form and attributes of 
the Cause of all things, its residence 
and disposition, while they smother 
under the pall of inappreciation, the 
best evidence of its existence, and the 
most potent workings of its power, 
within themselves. And all this be- 
cause they work from the wrong end, 
and are dull to the efficacy of growth 
from the basis of Emancipation. 

Their method of life is like the un- 
raveling of a snarled skein from the 
middle. They fumble futilely at the 
snarl, and accomplish little, if any- 
thing, when they ought first to release 
the end within themselves, and follow 
the cord from that beginning, along 
the line of growth and organization, 
to the condition of unrestricted free- 
dom, and usefulness, — the condition 
of Emancipated Brotherhood. 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING IIQ 

Religions are founded, fraternal 
societies are formed, armies are mar- 
shalled, and nations are grown about 
a sympathetic idea, to which the ma- 
jority subscribe. The aim is always 
the same : growth, protection, har- 
mony, happiness, Heaven. But the 
growth is slow, the protection is only 
partial, the harmony is incomplete, 
perfect happiness is impossible, and 
Heaven is indefinite and remote ; 
because their organization tolerates 
selfishness as a necessary ** mark of 
Cain," instead of being built on the 
foundation of Emancipation. 

All true calculation must recognize 
a unit of value ; in menticulture the 
only true unit is Emancipation. 

In harmony, instruments cannot be 
tuned from several standards ; there 
must be one key-note; and harmony in 
menticulture can only come from the 
key-note — Emancipation. 



SLAVES OR FREEMEN-WHICH? 



SLAVES OR FREEMEN 

Within the memory of many now 
living, Society was dominated by the 
belief that human body-slavery was a 
Divine institution. 

Thirty-five years ago a great war 
was waged against the institution in 
this country, at the expense of hun- 
dreds of thousands of lives, and thou- 
sands of millions of dollars worth of 
property. 

That war resulted not only in kill- 
ing the institution itself, but also in the 
extirpation of the idea of its Divine 
origin. 

It is no longer a question of debate 
in any part of the civilized word, but 
an established international under- 
standing, that slavery is not only 
unjust to the enslaved, but an evil, the 
effects of which are shared by the 

master. 

123 



124 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

Negro slavery in America was, how- 
ever, a mild and beneficent institution, 
as compared to the voluntary servitude 
to Mercenary Fashion, which enthrals 
so m.any at the present time. Merce- 
nary Fashion places burdens on rich 
and poor alike, and costs Society more 
lives and property yearly, than all that 
was wasted during the war of the Re- 
bellion. 

Most of the masters of the negro 
were kindly and considerate, and not 
a few of the negro uncles and aunties 
now living, regret the ''good old times 
when marster and missus did all the 
plannin' and pervidin', and all we uns 
had to do was work, and sing and 
dance." 

On the other hand. Mercenary 
Fashion has headquarters in Paris, 
in London, in Vienna, and in Berlin; 
and sets its traps all over the world, 
baited with styles of such absurd 
taste and uselessness that interest in 
them can only be brief. It is part of 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 1 25 

its deliberate policy, not to suggest 
any form or style that has merit suffi- 
cient to make it desirable a second 
season. It avoids any approach to the 
simple and beautiful and comfortable 
drapery used by the ancient Greeks, 
because of fear that its trade will be 
ruined by the stability of the wares. 
Ostentation is the ever-ready victim 
to take the poisonous bait; and then, 
there is a mad rush of the mimicking 
slaves, to assume the fetters which 
bind them to constant toil. Dishonor, 
infamy, and shame, are braved by men 
and women alike, in following the 
allurements of Mercenary Fashion. 

Fear (of criticism) and Envy are 
the two phases of the root passions, 
that are the most powerful and active 
agents in securing victims for Merce- 
nary Fashion; but, if Emancipation 
were the established rule of life, 
these agents would not exist; Osten- 
tation would not be followed; and 
Taste, and Usefulness, and Perma- 



126 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

nence, would be the leaders instead 
and a state of cooperation which might 
properly be named Good Fashion, or 
God Fashion, would succeed the 
tyrant of the present ; and Fashion, 
under such conditions, would be a bles- 
sing instead of a curse as at present. 
Mercenary Fashion has met with a 
formidable adversary in the bicycle. 
The absurd costumes inflicted by it on 
a servile world, seem as ridiculous 
when mounted on a bicycle, as if 
they were placed on the David of 
Michael Angelo, or on the Venus de 
Milo. Bicycle costumes for women 
may not displace all others; but, with 
the freedom of movement enjoyed on 
the wheel, in a costume suitable to 
the unhampered action of a biped; 
with the constant restraint of position 
rendered necessary by the wearing of 
skirts removed, woman may soon be- 
come free to move and act as Nature 
designed that she should move and act, 
and enjoyment of this new freedom 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 127 

will greatly modify her slavery to Mer- 
cenary Fashion. 

Fashion (or mimicry) is good, if 
properly led. 

If it were fashionable to believe 
that anger and worry were unnecessary 
weeds of the mind, were blemishes 
that could be removed from the dispo- 
sition, were habits that were unbecom- 
ing to civilized man, and were handi- 
caps to energy and happiness that 
could be put aside at will, the world 
could follow that fashion to a state of 
Emancipation, with all the enthusiasm 
it could muster, and benefit itself by 
being fashionable. 

And, should a just appreciation of 
the power within us become fashion- 
able, the tendency to mimicry; which is 
now the connecting link of resemblance 
between us and the monkey from 
which we have evolved, would become 
an element of strength, instead of an 
element of weakness. 

We, as individuals, support the 



128 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

fashions, but we do not suggest them. 
We support waste and discomfort, for 
the benefit of mercenary and designing 
fashion-makers, with the product of 
never-ending toil, because we ape 
Ostentation, cringe before Fear, and 
encourage Envy as an attribute of 
Pride. 

We are slaves indeed! not only in 
the matter of clothes, but in the matter 
of the distribution of the necessities 
and luxuries of life and comfort. We 
do some things more cleverly than the 
rest of the world, but in others we 
excel in clumsiness and inconsistency. 
In Mexico (our nearest neighbor), a 
sharpened stick is still used for plow- 
ing; but, that is not nearly as crude, of 
its kind, as some of the business 
methods that we support in this coun- 
try are of their kind; and in matters 
of utmost importance, too. For in- 
stance: in the city of Montgomery, Ala- 
bama, there is a square, or rather a 
diamond, around which, and within a 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 1 29 

block of which, there are eight or nine 
drug stores. This may not be an 
unusual bunching of druggists, but, as 
Montgomery is a meeting point of 
several terminal railroads, and trains 
from all directions are usually detained 
there one or two hours, I have had 
abundant opportunity to study this 
constellation of red and green lights, 
that blink and stare at all who visit 
the park they look on. They all seem 
to be full fledged, and fully equipped 
drug stores, and not devoted to special- 
ties, as one would suppose as a reason 
for there being so many of them. 

As it is, there are eight stores, eight 
stocks of goods, eight sets of clerks, 
eight insurance policies, eight compu- 
tations of interest, eight gas or electric 
light bills, and probably eight many- 
other items of expense chargeable to 
the profits on the sales, and supported 
by the public, when one establishment 
would serve all the people of Mont- 
gomery better than the eight do now. 



I30 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

If these stores were scattered about 
the city, the matter of convenience 
could be urged for their existence. To 
support such prodigality, profits rang- 
ing from one hundred to one thousand 
per cent, have to be charged, and the 
public evidently pays them, for their 
existence from year to year is evidence 
of support from some one. Suppose 
the Corporation of the City of Mont- 
gomery were to vote an appropriation 
of fifty thousand (or perhaps only 
/twenty thousand) dollars, for the pur- 
I pose of establishing a first-class dispen- 
^ary of medicines, etc., and should put 
it in charge of a competent chemist, 
j who would know what medicines were 
I I good, and what compounds were not 
If good? The patronage of the citizens 
'■ would support such an establishment 
on a ten per cent, basis of profit, and 
pay ten per cent, interest on the invest- 
ment without doubt, and the citizens 
would not be at the mercy of chance 
or imposition, in a matter of prime 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 131 

importance to health, as they are liable 
to be, under any but the most perfect 
system of selecting and dispensing 
drugs and patent medicines. 

This is a single instance among thou- 
sands, of the unintelligent application 
of the doctrine of laissez faire to 
matters of vital social interest; and is 
given here to illustrate a form of slav- 
ery to inconvenience and waste, that 
would be cleared away like mist before 
the sun, as the result of evolution, 
from the standpoint of Emancipation. 

It required a million guns, and the 
assistance of several million men, 
with all the waste and blood which 
war carries with it, to free the negro; 
and the advance of humanity the 
world over, was a fruit, worth the cost 
of the war; but slavery of the individ- 
ual to the parasite passions, will not 
enlist the rescue of arms, although 
it entails greater hardship than was 
ever suffered by the average negro 
slave. Each individual must gain for 




132 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

himself this freedom ; no one else can 
aid him except through suggestion 
and moral help. It is his birthright 
however, and awaits his call. 

The face of the martyr glowed 
with radiant happiness, when he ex- 
claimed to his jailers from the con- 
fines of his chains, ''You have bound 
my body, but you cannot bind my soul! 
Kill my body if you like ! it will only 
give greater freedom to my soul." But 
the so-called free citizen of to-day; 
who smothers himself under the blan- 
ket of worry; or, who spits angry in- 
justice at a self-created-phantom-cause 
for resentment, is a weak and pitiable 
wretch, as compared with the bonden 
martyr or negro of long ago. 
/^"^ Emancipation, or, a perfectly de-an- 
gered and de-worryized mind, can only 
be secured through conviction of its 
possibility, and not simply through an 
intellectual admission of its possibility. 
Faith is the pre-requisite of every suc- 
cessful accomplishment in life. ) Ad 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 133 

axiom of the circus ring warns an 
acrobat, or a gymnast, never to 
attempt a feat, unless he has perfect 
confidence in his ability to perform it 
successfully. Knowledge and the ap- 
preciation of the power of the mind 
over phantoms of its own creation, 
and confidence to expel them, is as 
necessary in menticulture as is the con- 
fidence of the gymnast in performing 
wonderful feats of menti-physical skill. 
The condition required for growth to 
Emancipation, is that of perfect faith 
and confidence, born of knowledge 
of the power God has given us to 
''cast out evil," and in that condition, 
Emancipation, when attained, can be 
anchored safely, protected from any 
of the battling and surging elements 
of discord from without. 

The researches of many scientific 
societies along the lines of Psychic 
Phenomena, endorsed by every utter- 
ance of Christ, reveal the fact that 
faith is a pre-requisite to subjection, or 



134 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

control, of the mind. The best sub- 
jects in scientific hypnotism are the 
strongest minded (who believe through 
knowledge), and the weakest minded 
(who believe through credulity); while 
the creatures of vacillating impulses, 
are hopeless dolts in the hands of the 
hypnotist, and will be those who will 
have to acquire Mental Emancipation 
because it is fashionable, and not be- 
cause it is sensible. 

The condition of Emancipation is 
one of faith in the beginning ; but, as 
soon as it is attained, there is no desire 
to replant mental weeds, and no strug- 
gle to repress them, for there are no 
roots or seeds from which to grow them. 

Faith must precede, but examples 
of Emancipation are sure to develop 
in every community, and soon the at- 
mosphere will be pregnant with the 
possibility of it. Then it will be easy 
to follow the fashion and dismiss anger 
and worry; and, after a little, shame 
will attach to the possession of them. 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 135 

Growth and happiness will result from 
the elimination of the germs of strife; 
natural cooperation will follow natural 
growth; and we will catch up with Mr. 
Bellamy's prophecy, long before the 
time specified in "Looking Backward," 
by the simple unraveling of a silken 
skein of endless possibilities from tJie 
free end within ourselves. 

Fear that individuality will be lost 
in cooperation, is one of the hot-shot- 
missiles of mendacity, that is being 
fired at Cooperation from the citadel 
of the condemned passions, by the 
slaves of the tottering house of Can' t, 
but will fall, harmless, before the 
armor of Emancipation. 

Does it lessen the individuality of 
the gardener to weed his soil? Does it 
weaken the individuality of a patient to 
cut out the root of his cancer? Does 
it militate against the power of a cause, 
to rid it of its faults? Will the runner 
run less swiftly, or the jumper jump 
less far, if they remove the handicap? 



ORGANIZATION 



ORGANIZATION 

While Emancipation in the individ- 
ual is worth more than all the wealth 
of the world to him without it, organ- 
ization about the idea is desirable for 
the purpose of aiding others ; and, 
(through cooperation and the most 
perfect economics) lightening the bur- 
den of compulsory labor, in order that 
there shall be more time to devote to 
recreation and recreative labor. 

Organization on the basis of Eman- 
cipation is sure to be the next great 
movement of reform and growth, in 
the light of whose strength, the puny 
efforts of the past will seem like the 
light of a tallow dip beside an electric 
cluster. 

This will come ; not because I have 
discovered it for myself and am pub- 
lishing an account of the discovery to 

139 



I40 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

my friends, but because the world has 
learned something of the powers at its 
command ; has learned the possibility 
of germ cure in physics ; has learned 
the efficacy of mental therapeutics in 
matters of both mind and body ; and 
is ripe for it. When I tell my friends 
my experience and deductions, they 
are prepared at once to accept them 
with credence. And so it will be with 
them and their friends, for logic and 
self interest are merits to commend 
it to all intelligent persons ; and, 
in the immediate future, it is not 
unreasonable to hope that Emanci- 
pation, as a basic condition favorable 
to growth and Brotherhood, may not 
be an uncommon accomplishment and 
requirement. I believe that it is one 
of the first steps urged in Christian 
Science and rendered possible by the 
belief, as it is in the Buddhist Disci- 
pline and Christian formula, and in 
the circle of my acquaintance there 
are already many believers in the 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 14I 

possibility of Emancipation, who are 
enjoying its benefits; who find that it 
is the one little ingredient necessary to 
perfect their established beliefs, and 
strengthen their present affiliations ; 
and to whom it adds everything and 
from whom takes nothing. 

All the members of religious sects; 
all the members of fraternal socie- 
ties, as well as many of the disconnected 
seekers after intellectual and spiritual 
growth, should be eager to enroll 
themselves under the banner of Eman- 
cipation ; and if this should happen, 
the wished for Utopia of the most fer- 
tile imagination, would not be as re- 
mote as it has seemed to be in the past. 



HOPE 



HOPE 

When one has attained the condi- 
tion of Emancipation, let him be sure 
that it is only the elementary stage of 
growth, the happy childhood of true 
life (no matter what the physical age 
of the body), and that there is a possi- 
bility of development to a point of un- 
selfishness, whence one can view one's 
own individuality from without, and 
direct its action from an impersonal 
standpoint. Then each of us can will 
himself to act as he would like to have 
a beloved friend or relative act in any 
given situation. 

I believe that this is true, and en- 
tirely possible to the emancipated 
mind; but, as I have aimed to present 
only a personal discovery and experi- 
ence, I will leave a deeper consideration 
of the subject to the test of a longer 
acquaintance with the new-found life. 

H5 



TWENTIETH CENTURY HOPE 



TWENTIETH CENTURY HOPE 

In furnishing for a new edition of 
Menticulture an addition to the fore- 
going chapters, I cannot do better than 
take my cue from the caption of the 
preceding chapter, which was the last 
chapter of the previous editions. 

Hope is an ever pregnant theme, but 
never more so than at the present mo- 
ment. 

The emancipation of the individual 
unit of Society from the thraldom of 
the invading passions that are grouped 
under the class names of anger and 
worry, as surely leads to the release of 
altruistic impulses that will free Society 
from the diseases of indifference, license 
and poverty, as did the emancipation of 
a few bondmen finally lead to a uni- 
versal recognition of the principle of 
human freedom. 

149 



I50 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

The acceleration of progress is geo- 
metric in ratio and has never yet been 
disappointing. It has taught us to 
hope for anything we desire and to 
know that if it is good it shall not be 
denied us. 

The Optimism that was so clearly 
taught by the Master of our Civiliza- 
tion two thousand years ago has grown 
in possibilities to a point where optimists 
can confidently adopt the motto ''All can 
be and therefore ^-^^//^^ well/'* and the 
abundant accomplishments of progress 
are evidence of the possibilities of the 
realization of the motto being attained. 

In formulating a Hope for the Twen- 
tieth Century we must first take an 
inventory of what we are and what 
we have; note the defects in ourselves 
and in our possessions; outline in our 

♦This motto was suggested by a definition of 
" Optimism," rendered by the Rev. Dr. Newell 
Dwight Hillis in an address on Optimism, delivered 
at Central Music Hall, Chicago, Sunday, June i6th, 
1897, ^^^ fully reported in the Inter Ocean of the fol- 
lowing date. 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 151 

minds what we would like to be and 
what we would like to have; and then 
proceed to plan and build accordingly, 
with the assurance of receiving what 
we desire. 

With a great surplus of means, the 
matter of attainment of any reasonable 
hope is not difficult and need not long 
be delayed. Things — or means — do 
not have to be acquired, as we already 
have them in abundance. It only re- 
quires a change in the national point- 
of-view and a change of the direction 
of existing energy from wasteful and 
unprofitable selfishness to profitable 
co-operative altruism. The individual 
point-of-view of the majority (pessi- 
mistic assertion to the contrary not- 
withstanding) is now altruistic, but being 
nationally unorganized does not show 
its strength as opposed to the small 
minority of the perversely selfish. All 
of the prevailing conditions seem to be 
favorable to a change from enforced 
selfishness to co-operative or voluntary 



152 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

altruism, and the nineteen hundredth 
anniversary of the birth of Christ is a 
fitting occasion for a Christian nation to 
re-adjust its manners and its economies 
on the plan of the Master, as intended 
by the Declaration of Independence 
and the Constitution. 

Society, in experimenting with gov- 
ernment, has tried and suffered many 
different forms. In the beginning there 
were only families in which all men and 
women were brothers and sisters in 
sympathy. Tribal government was but 
an extension of family government to 
cover many families. Under tribal 
organization, however, wars began and 
slavery was instituted as one of the re- 
sults of conquest. Slavery, in turn, in- 
fluenced forms of government by creat- 
ing the baronial, the military, the 
ecclesiastic, and finally the '' heavenly- 
ordained" autocratic forms, until, hav- 
ing over-reached endurance, these ex- 
treme selfish forms began to be reformed 
in the constitutional monarchy and 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 



153 



finally in the democratic government as 
represented by the several republics of 
the present time. 

In framing the government of the 
United States the effort to attain the 
simplicity and purity of family — broth- 
erly rule — and the unrestrained strength 
of individual freedomandenergy at the 
same time, license was allowed the 
title of Liberty, and, protected by that 
sacred title, has fostered iniquity, has 
encroached with brazen effrontery be- 
yond the point of patient endurance, 
and must soon meet the stern reproof 
of an outraged altruistic sentiment. 
License, in control of democratic gov- 
ernment has proved itself to be more 
autocratic and tyrannical than any of the 
preceding usurpations of rule, and, go- 
ing the way of all tyrants, must soon be 
crushed out. It is the brightest Hope 
of the Approaching Century that its 
dawn will witness the inauguration of a 
crusade against this chief and most far- 
reaching evil of our otherwise wise and 



154 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

almost perfect form of national co- 
operation. 

License, masquerading as Liberty, 
has permitted selfishness to usurp the 
place of altruism in the national habit- 
of-thought, but the national point-of- 
view can be changed to the normal civi- 
lized point-of-view by organized effort, 
and the dawn of the Twentieth Century 
of the Christian Era is a good time to 
agree to a general truce of greed and to 
a change to normal civilized habits of 
social relations. 

WHAT WE ARE 

Our first duty in preparing to build 
a Twentieth Century Hope is to frank- 
ly note what we are, and how we be- 
have as individuals and as a nation. 
In the first place, our vaunted Democ- 
racy has become an Oligarchy of Greed, 
administered by License whose god is 
money — Mammon. This is not cant, 
although it sounds bad enough to be 
cant. 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 1 55 

The administration of our national, 
state, and municipal governments is a 
constant reproach because of the dom- 
inating influence of money and cor- 
rupting lobbies, and much of our rep- 
resentation abroad in the capitals and 
marts of foreign nations is, greatly to 
our shame, ridiculous, being made so 
through the spoils system of appoint- 
ment. 

There is unceasing strife between 
capital and labor — between the pro- 1; 

ducer, or parent, of capital, and its un- \\ 

grateful offspring. There are squalor 
and crime and unrest where there i 

should be only harmony and happiness. | 

There is, to be sure, not much of ' 

these evils in comparison to the good 
that prevails, but there should be less 
and even none of them. | 

As a nation, we have seasons and, 
latterly, long terms when there is much 
of idleness, poverty and want; public 
improvements that we greatly need are 
lacking; and general or universal edu- 



156 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

cation is sadly neglected in many lo- 
calities. 

Here are the three chief requisites 
of a high grade Christian Civilization 
unfulfilled. May we not hope for a 
Twentieth Century cure for these Nine- 
teenth Century evils? 

Whenever there is any surplus of 
labor the unemployed are at the mercy 
of the meanest of alien employers. By 
forcing wages nearly down to the star- 
vation point, through the dire necessi- 
ties of the unemployed, these heart- 
less employers and soulless corpora- 
tions secure an advantage in cost of 
production that compels normally sym- 
pathetic and generous employers to do 
the same or fail in business, until, 
through the unholy greed of a single 
''meanest of the mean," the prevailing 
scale of wages is made and kept as 
low as it is possible to offer work- 
men, work-women and work-children, 
and yet prevent the hungry from kill- 
ing the opulent in order to get food. 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 157 

The point has already been reached 
where there is, and must continue to 
be, an increasing surplus of labor in the 
United States, even without further 
immigration, and hence, unless there is 
organized effort to prevent it, all labor 
is doomed to become the serf of soul- 
less capital and at the mercy of the 
meanest of employers, instead of being 
privileged to cheerfully work under the 
protection of the most generous, as 
should be the case. 

In the matter of roads — national 
highways — also, we are at the mercy 
of mean or alien property holders; and 
in that of education, many of our fel- 
low-citizens — our brothers by the com- 
mand of Christianity and of humanity 
— are at the mercy of parents of de- 
praved intelligence through toleration 
of license as a phase of Liberty. 

It is an old saying, but always re- 
mains a fundamental truism, that "A 
chain is no stronger than its weakest 
link." It is equally true that a system 



158 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

of social or industrial economics is no 
safer from the incursions of selfishness 
than the possible invasion of its most 
pregnable loop-holes; that a highway- 
is no better than its roughest section; 
and that systems of government and 
education are no more invulnerable 
than their weakest administration. 

If license be tolerated in any de- 
gree it will invade the smallest loop- 
hole, ruin the smoothest highway, and 
weaken the best intentions of educa- 
tion and government. 

In a government administered on the 
basis of altruism, neither fear nor 
license would have an abiding-place. 
Let us hope that the divinely ordained 
Forethought and Liberty of the Twen- 
tieth Century may be freed from these 
Nineteenth Century parasites. 

CIVILIZED NEEDS 

Our next step in evolving a Twen- 
tieth Century Hope should be to con- 
fine our present desires within our im- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 159 

mediate possibilities, and then proceed 
to hope and act them into existence. 

Absence of poverty is the first neces- 
sity of the highest civilization, and uni- 
versal education and public improve- 
ments of the greatest efficiency and 
of the greatest beauty are the next 
requisites of civilized national equip- 
ment. These three include within 
themselves all that could be wished for 
a nation, for their attainment implies 
pure government and naturally leads to 
all else that can be desired. 

Let us now build a Hope as to how 
these civilized needs may be secured. 

A public improvement of first im- 
portance is that of Good Free Roads. 
Good railroads are not sufficient be- 
cause they are not now free, and Good 
Free Roads are a prime requisite of 
freedom. 

The public roads of the United 
States are almost the worst to be found 
in any civilized country, because there 
is no uniformity of plan in building 



l6o MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

them, and no widely organized effort 
to secure them, obstruction in that 
direction being at the mercy of the 
stingiest and least progressive of the 
owners of abutting property, as before 
stated. 

In road construction we follow the 
lead of the least liberal, least intelligent 
and least progressive, instead of the 
lead of the most liberal, wisest and 
most patriotic. How can we change 
our leaders and secure roads worthy of 
a civilized nation? That is the ques- 
tion. 

Within the most consistent interpre- 
tation of the intention of the Constitu- 
tion relative to the federation of the 
States that comprise our United States, 
— an intention so self-evident to the 
framers of the Constitution that it did 
not call for explicit reference, — Inter- 
state Communication of the freest and 
easiest sort, under the control of the 
Federal Government, holds first place 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING i6t 

in importance, and Good Free Roads 
are the natural means. 

It would clearly be within the scope, 
and should be the first duty, of the Fed- 
eral Government to build the best pos- 
sible highways by the shortest routes 
between the different State capitals. 
These Interstate Roads should be the 
care of the Federal Government, and 
should be protected by Federal Gov- 
ernment regulations of the most intel- 
ligent kind. 

In building these roads the Govern- 
ment could establish a standard of 
wages consistent with the necessities of 
living in each locality, and aim to em- 
ploy labor in such a . way as to absorb 
all of the surplus not required in pri- 
vate enterprises; and, construction of 
the national highways beginning at all 
of the State capitals, work would be 
within reach of all unemployed, and 
could be pushed or suspended accord- 
ing to the labor emergency. 



1 62 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

This plan would make It necessary 
for private enterprises to pay the estab- 
lished standard of living wages at leasty 
and, in addition, whatever premium 
scarcity might impose. Government in 
that case would stand as a moderator 
between capital and labor, to the extent 
of freeing labor from the coercion of 
dire necessity that is now taken advan- 
tage of by the greed of soulless em- 
ployers, and at the same time it would 
leave the whole outside realm of com- 
petition open to choice, in which to 
assert and foster individualism within 
the private industries. 

The army of the necessarily unem- 
ployed is at no time a very large army, 
and if the hours of labor prevailing 
throughout all the occupations were 
reasonably limited, that army would be 
still smaller; but the possibility of being 
compelled to join it is the one ever- 
present dread and uncertainty of the 
wage-earner and the constant menace 
to his happiness. It is the source of 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 163 

more fear and worry, and anger and 
strife, and friction, and drunkenness 
than any other cause. 

The evil of any surplus of labor over 
the demand for labor is very far-reach- 
ing. Not alone is all labor affected 
thereby, through the machinations of 
alien employers, but it becomes the op- 
portunity of the lazy — the drones in 
the national hive — to shirk, and to 
lean on charity rather than seek employ- 
ment. This shirking can easily be done 
under present conditions, because there 
is no way for the charitable indi- 
vidual to discriminate, and hence the 
possibility of the genus tramp that is 
a disgrace to our fair land and a re- 
proach to a civilization where wealth is 
superabundant, as it is now in the 
United States. 

Charity-Organization societies in 
many of the large cities have helped 
charitably inclined individuals to dis- 
criminate, and have prevented much 
of the indiscriminate and injudicious 



1 64 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

giving that once was a means of harm 
instead of a means of good as intended, 
but they have effected mitigation only 
and not the desired cure of the under- 
lying evil that civilization demands; 
for, under the best intention and work- 
ing of the charity societies, there may 
yet be both compulsory poverty and 
perverse poverty; and, while no civilized 
nation or national sentiment should tol- 
erate the necessity of compulsory pov- 
erty, it should put its mark of sternest 
disapproval on poverty that is perverse. 
Civilization means growth, growth 
means work; and the opportunity to 
work at living wages is the imperative 
care of civilized government. 

If the Federal Government were to 
organize plans to connect the State 
capitals with the best possible highways 
as a means of Free Interstate Com- 
munication, the next step necessarily 
following, as the result of the national 
example, would be for the State gov- 
ernments to connect the county-seats 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 165 

in the same manner; and, following 
that, the county governments would 
necessarily have to similarly connect 
the cities and the towns, until the sys- 
tem of good roads throughout the 
country would be complete, and all 
profitably accomplished within the es- 
tablished functions of the several 
national, state, county and municipal 
governments. 

PREVENTION BETTER AND CHEAPER 
THAN CURE 

As a matter of necessity as well as 
expediency, states and counties now take 
care of their paupers and their insane, 
who are made so by limitations and in- 
harmonic social conditions that have 
grown up in this Nineteenth Century, 
and which were undreamed of in the 
Eighteenth Century when the Consti- 
tution was framed. May they not 
begin to anticipate the acceleration of 
progress and create conditions at the 
opening of the Twentieth Century that 



l66 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

will make pauperism unnecessary, and 
therefore not tolerable, and, as such, 
impossible? 

All this can be accomplished under 
the Constitution, and for the next 
twenty years the building of much- 
needed public improvements might be 
used to absorb the surplus of labor and 
establish a standard of living wages, and 
may be confined to road making in the 
manner suggested, until there shall be 
only good roads and perfect roads to 
every inhabitable part of the country; 
and, after that, other civilized improve- 
ments will suggest themselves until the 
end of time, for the limit of improve- 
ment can never be reached if its lead be 
once taken and followed. 

If these modifying, and at the same 
time profitable, improvements were to 
involve the use of the public credit to 
any extent whatever within the neces- 
sities of the case, would it not seem to 
be a wise Twentieth Century innovation 
to make a ten percent public invest- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 167 

ment at a three percent cost, rather than 
breed an anarchy that may lead to the 
ruin of a great war. 

Had the nation peacefully freed the 
black slaves of 1861 at a cost of a thou- 
sand dollars each, it would not have 
sacrificed a million white lives, ruined 
billions of dollars' worth of property, 
and burdened the resources of five de- 
cades with a pension roll that now 
stands at nearly two hundred millions of 
dollars. Instead ; it would have saved it 
all for the uses of harmony, peace and 
progress, and would not have prosti- 
tuted it for the uses of war, ruin and 
an inheritance of partisan bribery that 
offers temptation to idleness and false- 
hood by the perpetuation of contingent 
pensions that were not earned. 

DEPARTMENTS OF ECONOMIC EDUCA- 
TION 

It has also been established by suc- 
cessful experiment that it is the proper 
function of the General Government 



l68 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

to create departments of experiment- 
ation and statistics, in order to freely fur- 
nish the best information on any subject 
to any citizen who may seek it. The sub- 
jects of hygiene and economy are of 
the most vital importance to all per- 
sons. In connection with the building 
of Interstate highways, our present 
unintelligent fellow-citizens employed 
on the public works might easily be in- 
structed in simple rules of economy and 
hygiene. They might be given, in the 
form of rations, the benefit of the best 
food with which to feed muscle, and also 
might be taught particulars of the best 
methods of production, preparation, 
cost, etc., of economic and nutritious 
food that would better equip those who 
had once served in government em- 
ployment, for the practice of hygiene 
and economy in living when they 
returned to private employment. In 
this manner the system that would be 
known to the heads of the Departments 
of Hygiene and Economy as the best 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 169 

and most economic system of furnish- 
ing fuel to the body of the laborer, 
would, through the wide and all-in- 
clusive extent of the Interstate High- 
way service, become the education of 
all the citizens of the country and at 
the cost only of the initial expense of 
one experimental station under the ad- 
vice of the highest obtainable intelli- 
gence on the subject. 

ECONOMY THE BASIS 

And what would all of this con- 
templated outlay of public funds lead 
to in the way of profitable returns? 

President Potter, of the League of 
American Wheelmen, is able to show 
by accurate statistics that the bad 
roads of the United States cost, in 
waste of power and in waste of horses 
and vehicles, each two years, as much 
as would be required to make perfect 
and permanent roads to take the place 
of the bad roads. 

We have, therefore, a crying need 



I70 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

of Good Free Roads, whose neglect is 
a national reproach, and the correction 
of which, together with stringent immi- 
gration laws, and a sliding scale of 
hours of labor, .would effectively, hu- 
manely and profitably cure the shame- 
ful and far-reaching evil of compulsory 
poverty for several years to come; and, 
surely lead eventually to the inaugura- 
tion of an era of compulsory manual as 
well as intellectual education of youth 
during the developing period, and 
thereby still further relieve the ranks 
of the unemployed by keeping un- 
taught and undeveloped children out 
of the productive occupations. 

One generation of this sort of Chris- 
tian and humane fraternalism would 
solve the problem of labor for the 
present and for all time, because, as 
machinery encroached on hand labor, 
hours of labor could be shortened by 
law, and the Lords of Production 
would become, more and more, the 
freemen they deserve to be. 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 1 71 

Our Twentieth Century Hope has 
suggested a way whereby, in using our 
best intelligence instead of our lack of 
intelligence, we may open up free 
channels of communication between 
the states, between the counties, and 
between the cities and hamlets, and 
in the doing of it in an intrinsically 
patriotic and profitable manner create 
a really free people to use them — 
possess ourselves of perfect arteries 
and veins within our body-politic and 
start the red and white corpuscles of 
national blood to circulating freely in 
them, so that there shall be neither 
congestion nor paralysis in any of its 
parts. 

That '' General " Coxey advocated 
some such plan of organized effort 
to mitigate want by the promotion of 
much needed improvements, from a 
point-of-view that created antagonism 
in political circles, because it advocated 
an irredeemable and non-interest bear- 
ing currency with which to pay the 



172 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

labor employed, is no reason why 
the opening of the Twentieth Cen- 
tury should not see the benefit of a 
similar or modified plan from other 
points-of-view, and thereby put in 
operation a practical system of sorely 
needed reform. As a matter of experi- 
ence, the fact of a proposition having 
been suggested and laughed at as an 
innovation against established habit-of- 
thought and stupidly venerated custom 
is the best evidence that it will event- 
ually be adopted in a form not greatly 
different from that of the initial propo- 
sition. Vide the Penny- Post. 

BY WHAT MEANS ? 

And what means, we may reason- 
ably ask, does our Twentieth Century 
Hope offer to accomplish the modera- 
tion of compulsory poverty and the 
attainment of public improvements, 
whose doing would serve a doubly 
profitable purpose, and which our sur- 
plus wealth entitles us to have? 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 173 

Many forms of political organization 
have failed to give us what we desire, 
and yet what we want is really at our 
command, and is all our own. 

Manipulators of unequal taxation, 
unjust discrimination and corporate 
greed have been entrusted with the 
management of our government. We 
must consider it a trust because we have 
either endorsed it with our votes or 
permitted it by neglecting to vote. The 
trust has not been a voluntary one on 
our part, but with our present lack of 
organized self-protection and co-opera- 
tive altruism — the natural yearning 
for which has been drugged nearly to 
death by lazy apathy — the administra- 
tion of our most vital interests has 
slipped out of our own hands and fallen 
into the hands of the utterly selfish, 
through the manipulation of ward poli- 
tics in the control of the saloon-made 
and other depraved influences. Drink- 
ing saloons, where present politics are 
chiefly manipulated and controlled, 



174 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

thrive on the life-blood of spasmodic 
idleness and thrift — the thrift furnish- 
ing the means and idleness the oppor- 
tunity to patronize saloons — and the 
uncertainty of it all has created a 
habit-of-worry that tries to drown it- 
self in drink, thereby adding misery 
to misery. 

In the direction of the present ad- 
ministration of politics, it is, therefore, 
hopeless to look for what we most de- 
sire. It has had its opportunity to 
administer wisely, but has neglected it. 

But the Twentieth Century Hope has 
been made brighter by the gradual 
formation of other kinds of organization 
that are more powerful in their ''might 
of right," and to these we dedicate our 
New Century Hope. 

Within a few years there have been 
formed almost no end of fraternal 
organizations, whose basic principle is 
the blessed Golden Rule. These in- 
clude all of the churches, and, together 
with the older fraternal organizations, 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 175 

comprise within their circles nearly all 
of the community. 

These already professedly altruistic 
organizations, however (in spite of the 
aspersion that in some of them the 
Golden Rule has been but an orna- 
ment and not a working hypothesis), 
are free and ready to form a general 
altruistic organization for mutual bene- 
fit and for the promotion of their joint 
basic principle, as is evidenced by the 
wonderful success of the Christian En- 
deavorer movement; and, ignoring all 
of the special objects of the fraternizing 
organizations, and, sticking to the main 
tenet of the Golden Rule, which is the 
key-note of all of the separate organiza- 
tions, they should be eager to celebrate 
the beginning of the Twentieth Cen- 
tury after the birth of its Author by 
putting His precepts into practical use 
in every-day life, in humanity, and in 
social and political economy, as He 
prescribed; and, thereby, incidentally 
return with loyalty to the pure in- 



176 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

tentions of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence and of the Constitution of 
our United States. No better guides for 
all time than the Golden Rule and the 
Constitution of the United States can 
be framed, because they were uttered 
by altruists and freemen for freemen 
and altruists, and attain within their 
intent the fostering of the heart's best 
impulses, the soul's best inspiration and 
the power of our own best co-operative 
strength. 

SIGNIFICANT LULL AND EXPECTANCY 

It is generally conceded that the 
spirit of co-operative altruism is domi- 
nant and but needs crystallization about 
a central idea or a central anniversary 
date. 

It is a notable and significant fact that 
there is no important party political 
issue before the country at present. 
Labor has tried and proved the futility 
of aggressive methods. The growth 
of almost automatic machine power, to- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 177 

gether with the great increase in the 
manufacturing activity of Germany and 
of Japan, and a threatened invasion by 
China of the field of manufacture, warn 
us that we must act quickly in self- 
protection or suffer the result of neglect. 
There is a lull in the storm of competi- 
tion, and in that lull the breath of hope 
is held in eager expectation. Even the 
patient interest of the Orient is expec- 
tant of some important change in De- 
cember, 1899. At that time the eight 
great planets will be in conjunction in 
Sagittarius, the first time in five thou- 
sand years, and in the lore of Oriental 
symbolism it portends the beginning of 
a world-reforming epoch. 

START RIGHT AND END RIGHT 

The United States is the kindergarten 
of nations. It is the object-lesson — 
the experiment-ground for the world. 
The whole world is looking for reform. 
Some expect to see the beginning sig- 
naled by the red fire of anarchy; but 



178 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

that must not be. Instead, let us 
read our future in the pure white light 
of altruism. The possibility of it is 
all centered in the point-of-view that 
directs our efforts. Let us take the 
right point-of-view. 

TIME, DISPOSITION AND MEANS 

There is ample time to prepare for 
a festival to take place in the opening 
year of the Twentieth Century, that 
will appropriately celebrate our re- 
turn to the freedom that was proclaimed 
by Christ and vouchsafed by our Consti- 
tution. There are already thousands 
of pools of reflected Christ-light that 
reflect also the glow of patriotic fire 
within our altruistic organizations. 
There are churches and lodges, and 
clubs and circles, and labor and trade 
guilds in almost every hamlet in the 
land as well as in the larger communi- 
ties. If professed brotherhood have 
any substance in fact, the members of 
all of these organizations are brothers; 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 179 

believe in every-day Christianity and 
every-day altruism; and would gladly 
send delegates to a convention to study 
the problems of inharmony and clumsy 
administration that now exist, and also 
to devise ways and means of correction. 
There are already hundreds, and prob- 
ably thousands, of students of the 
social and political problems of the 
times who have specialized their labors, 
and out of the observations and ex- 
periences of these can be found and 
selected a compendium of all the 
causes and effects of inharmony and 
the possible cures that can be applied 
to separate phases of evil. 

POWERFUL AIDS 

In the matter of Good Roads, 
as one of the elements of our Twen- 
tieth Century Hope, President Potter, 
ex-President Elliott of the League of 
American Wheelmen (and wheel- 
women) and a complete organiza- 
tion of earnest co-operators stand 



l8o MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

ready to show the legal, economical 
and moral aspects of the Good Roads 
Question, and to offer the unanimous 
vote of the entire army of wheelmen in 
support of a practical plan of establish- 
ing good roads."^ 

The plan suggested has already met 
with the approval of the farmers, who 
are the real producers of all of our pos- 
sessions; and, if submitted to the decis- 
ion of the majority in a general election, 
instead of, as is now the case, to the 
objection of the meanest and nar- 
rowest of their class, who are blind to 
their own best interests in local elec- 
tions, would find almost universal ap- 
proval. 

CAMPAIGN OF EDUCATION 

A convention, thus gathered in 1898, 
would have time to seek the world over 
for examples of the best that has been 
achieved in government and in general 

* Could wheelwomen and horses vote, bad roads 
would be tolerated no longer than was necessary to 
build good ones. 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING l8l 

progress, and start a campaign of sug- 
gestion and education that would rivet 
the attention of the whole country on 
the questions involved — a general inter- 
est in change of the point-of-view that 
would mean much for humanity. Dele- 
gates to the primary convention would 
return to their delegating organizations 
with material for discussion of the issues 
in hand, and great interest in economic 
questions would be aroused, until even 
the saloon and other professional politi- 
cal manipulators would see in the new 
movement brighter chances for them- 
selves in honest effort than had former- 
ly prevailed, and, at all events, would 
see no hope of opposition against or- 
ganized good, and would quickly turn 
to aid in the new acceleration of prog- 
ress. 

After ample discussion of the issues 
there would yet be time to send the 
wisest and the best of the members of 
these altruistic organizations as author- 
ized delegates to a final convention, 



1 82 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

where a pure and strong platform, 
without barter or exchange, could be 
framed, and candidates of sternest 
integrity and wisest equipment could 
be nominated to submit to the choice 
of the people as opposed to the saloon- 
made and greed-fostered ''platforms" 
and "tickets" of Nineteenth Century 
pattern. 

MEN BETTER THAN CONDITIONS 

Human nature is good nature if freed 
from fear and restraint, and if it seem 
profitable to be good there is a double 
incentive. Human nature as expressed 
in these United States is warped by 
conditions that are the results of slov- 
enly carelessness and unbridled license, 
but which are in no way created by real 
— only apparent — necessity. There are 
many more good men, and overwhelm- 
ingly more good women, in these 
United States than there are of the 
selfish and depraved sort, and there 
will be many more still if the pres- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 183 

ently-smothered spirit of altruism is 
only once given a chance to assert 
and establish itself. To prove this it 
is only necessary to sound the keynote 
of altruistic sentiment, by any name 
whatever, in any group of citizens gath- 
ered in car, in hotel rotunda, or in as- 
sembly hall, to receive almost universal 
approval. Even among professional 
politicians and the presently-depraved, 
the average of the good and generous 
is high. They measure by comparison 
and can see no harm in occupations 
that are licensed by the government 
and patronized by the rich and the 
self-constituted elite. Conditions have 
beset them and warped their choice; 
and politics as a business, and not be- 
cause they are patriotically inspired, as 
they should be, is their natural oppor- 
tunity for occupation, and a recognized 
spoils system, inspired by the devil of 
greed, is their teacher therein. 

Even the plutocratic manipulators 
of politics for personal selfish ends 



1 84 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

are not pleased with the roles they 
have to assume in relation to ''boodle" 
politics, and they cringe before the 
assumed necessity of swearing to lying 
tax lists and of winking at special ex- 
pense accounts ; but they must do what 
''boodle" politics demands or suspend 
business altogether, for it is the custom. 
Successful accumulators of great 
estates, while amassing wealth, com- 
monly see their sons made useless, and 
even reprobate, by means of the very 
wealth they have worked so hard to ac- 
cumulate. It is the conditions, and 
not the people, that are at fault, and 
our Twentieth Century Hope, accom- 
plished, would cause sighs of relief to 
ascend from palace, as well as from 
hovel, the land over. 

HERE, NOW, NEEDED AND POSSIBLE 

In expressing a Twentieth Century 
Hope it is natural for an optimist to 
foresee a realization of many harmoni- 
ous concords of social and industrial 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 185 

life that may seem in their possibility 
quite remote to the unthinking. 

On the plane of the Here and the 
Now, and the Needed and the Possible, 
however, there are three things that 
are vital to the progress and harmony 
of society, especially to Society as or- 
ganized under the confederation of the 
United States of America. 

Forced poverty, bad roads, and in- 
different education are the three things 
that are now the burning shame and the 
reproach of our otherwise fair land, 
and are the result of license. Cor- 
rupt politics and indecently inefficient 
foreign representation in many parts 
of the world, as the result of the 
spoils system, are but shadows of these 
three vital deficiencies of our political 
or communal administration; and yet 
they are the easiest possible things to 
correct by united effort. The cost 
of it all would come back to the coun- 
try within a decade, and in the mean- 
time serve as a moderator between 



1 86 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

capital and labor that would be a god- 
send to both of these supplemental in- 
terests. Systematic and compulsory 
education by the best means known to 
the science of pedagogy, including the 
so-called manual branches, removed 
from any political contamination, would 
take growing children and under-done 
youth from the lists of competitive 
labor, and much more effectively make 
use of the growing energies of such 
in manual training schools, where 
useful articles could be made in the 
course of teaching, than by present 
methods of neglect; and within one 
generation, or, at most, two, would 
completely and favorably solve the 
problems of ignorance and incapacity 
that are at the bottom of most of our 
evils. 

BETTER SUGGESTIONS EXPECTED 

Twentieth Century Hope may — 
surely will — lead to better suggestions 
than I can offer; and the right sug- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 187 

gestion Is sure to come from an un- 
expected source; therefore let every 
altruist — every advocate of the Golden 
Rule, whether woman or man, girl or 
boy, turn his point-of-view and his 
point-of-interest on our Twentieth 
Century Hope; for on the interest or 
suggestion of any one, she or he, may 
the possibility of the greatest reforms 
the world has seen hinge and depend. 

It is already an assured hope that 
the altruists of the land will get to- 
gether in convention, to consider the 
possibility of inaugurating the new mil- 
lennial period in a manner worthy of a 
country that stands for the highest 
Christian and civilized ideals. This is 
assured, because those whose motto is 
" All can be and therefore shall be well" 
have decreed that it shall be so, 

"BUGBEARS" A VAUNT ! 

A "bugbear" of United States 
politics has always been " paternalism," 
as opposed to " individualism," and it 



1 88 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

will probably be raised as a cry against 
any organized effort to modify the 
social inharmonies that prevail and, 
from sheer habit-of-thought, without 
logical consideration of the purport of 
plans that aim only to return to original 
intentions as embodied in the Declara- 
tion and in the Constitution. When 
those splendid documents were written 
and approved, social and industrial 
conditions were very different from 
what they are now. There was a great 
surplus of virgin acres, teeming with 
possibilities of wealth; there was but a 
limited supply of hand labor, and prac- 
tically no machines. Steam and elec- 
tricity had not been harnessed for use 
in the industries, and the most far-see- 
ing statesmen could not contemplate 
the possibility of a surplus of labor 
with no avenue of relief through the 
opportunity of pioneering beyond the 
limits of settled life. In those days 
there could be no congestion, because 
the occupations were not full to over- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 189 

flowing, through the usurpation of auto- 
matic machinery. 

If government have any holy office 
at all, the most holy is that of protec- 
tion. It is for this purpose that sol- 
diers and police are used, and not for 
the punishment of offenders against 
the peace and the liberties of the peo- 
ple (except as punishment is intended 
to serve protection); and it certainly is 
better for government to create har- 
monic conditions than it is to allow in- 
harmony wherein crime is almost a 
necessity. Civilized government was 
never intended to use its means and en- 
ergies in whipping instead of correct- 
ing. Paternalism is a thing of the 
past. It has no place in any possible 
issue of the present, but Fraternalism 
has come to take its place. And why 
should not government be as fraternal 
as its intelligence can make it when 
administering a Constitution whose 
key-note is brotherhood and equal op- 
portunity? 



IQO MENTICULTURE 

That it is the spirit of the national 
habit-of-thought that Fraternalism is 
the key-note of civilization is forcibly- 
expressed in many different ways, and 
without systematic collusion, by evi- 
dence of the constitutions and by-laws 
of all organized circles of citizens. 

Let us hope that the dawn of the 
Twentieth Century will look upon a 
country as free from ''bugbears" as it 
is free from real causes of inharmony; 
as free from fears as it is free from 
real causes of fear; as free from poverty 
as it is rich in means; as free from bad 
roads as it is now wanting in good 
roads; as pure in politics as the intent 
of the Constitution; and as altruistic in 
its social relations as the teaching of the 
Master whose anniversary it is. 



CORROBORATIVE AND ASSIS 
TIVE CRITICISM 



CORROBORATIVE AND ASSISTIVE 
CRITICISM 

It frequently happens that the criti- 
cisms brought out by a book are more 
valuable to the object of the book than 
is the book itself; and with this appre- 
ciation of the criticisms of the chapters 
of the early editions of Menticulture^ 
I havie gathered fragments from the 
press and beg leave to add them under 
the above caption. 

I have used the word ''assistive " 
because the word "assistant" is com- 
monly understood to mean ^^^ordinate, 
while the criticisms referred to are co- 
ordinate at least, and in my apprecia- 
tion super ox dXn2X^\ and it is to accen- 
tuate this that I am impelled to use an 
unusual term. 

Since Menticulture was first pub- 
lished, the author has received up- 

193 



594 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

wards of a thousand letters, many of 
which could properly be quoted under 
the caption of "Scraps of Evidence," 
as the greater number of them attest 
to benefits derived from the sugges- 
tions of the book. In considering the 
advisability of adding criticisms to the 
original brochure, many of these letters 
were selected for printing, but the 
great number of the desirable ones, 
and the difificulty of choosing between 
them, led to the determination to print 
none of them rather than to unjustly 
discriminate. 

Revision was also under consid- 
eration. It was recognized that the 
presentation was inadequate to the 
importance of the subject, and could be 
re-written to advantage, but at the same 
time the evidence of the commenda- 
tion received suggested that, as it had 
seemed to be effective in its present 
form in finding sympathy and ap- 
proval, it were better to let it stand as 
originally printed. 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 195 

Within the past few years there has 
been a great deal of attention given to 
the consideration of menticulture, in 
one form or another and under differ- 
ent names, so that scarcely a magazine 
is issued that does not contain an arti- 
cle on the evil effects of fear and the 
desirability of repressing the passions 
that are grouped under the class names 
of anger and worry. The philosophy of 
Frcebel, which is being developed and 
taught in the kindergartens, is doing 
greatest good in this direction. Child- 
thought is studied, and the effect of 
suggestions is carefully noted to de- 
termine how they are impressed into, 
or upon, the character of children. 

The first care in the kindergarten is 
to avoid teaching or permitting fear of 
the teacher, so that the confidence of 
the child can be secured for the pur- 
pose of better administering instruc- 
tion. Children are taught to mentally 
construct ideas and not alone to 
memorize the appearance of the ideas 



196 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

— to know the why and the how of 
everything including their own mental 
process. 

If this kindergarten method were 
carried on through the entire course of 
study, even to the university, the bene- 
fit of instruction would be much greater 
than it is now. 

The effect of teaching in the schools 
is thought by some to be more lasting 
than the effect of parental teaching and 
example, for parents largely are taken 
as a matter of course — almost as parts 
of the child itself — while teachers, in 
the eyes of the average child, stand for 
chosen models of wisdom and propri- 
ety, and are supposed to be in reality 
what they seem to be when they show 
only their best side to their pupils. 
For this reason, with children so im- 
pressed, the example or the instruction 
of the teacher is more impressive than 
that of the parent. 

For a term of years I happened to 
have a half-dozen large cities under 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 197 

observation by reason of frequent visits 
to them, and differences of character- 
istics of these cities, as distinct as dif- 
fering characteristics in men, were 
notable by comparison. In the cities 
where the control of the public schools 
was in the hands of ward politicians, 
the effect upon the morals of these 
cities, as influenced by the morals of 
teachers politically chosen, was marked 
and essentially bad. Favorites of mem- 
bers of the Boards of Education were 
appointed as teachers; the salaries of 
the teachers, in order to satisfy these 
favorites, were inordinately high, as. 
compared with the salaries in other 
cities where the quality of the service 
was much better; scandals were rife 
and disgustingly frequent; and, as a 
result, a decade of this subtile influence 
developed crops of loose morals and 
consequent scandals in the whole com- 
munity that were a reproach to the 
cities thus afllicted. 

In the one large city of the country 



Iq8 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

where the school fund was very limited, 
the inducements held out to the teachers 
were so small that they were insufficient 
to tempt the cupidity of those who were 
immorally inclined, and hence the 
politicians did not bother with the pa- 
tronage of the schools, leaving good 
citizens to administer the school de- 
partment; and the effect of pure exam- 
ple on the growing generation was 
markedly good as compared with other 
cities, and developed a crop of good 
morals that show their merit in immu- 
nity from scandal. 

In political schools — that is, in the 
schools where the patronage is sought 
by the politicians — teaching is second- 
ary, and salary-drawing is the primary 
consideration; lessons are given out 
by rule and heard by rule, without be- 
ing wisely interpreted by the teacher; 
and reward or punishment is applied 
by rule also, without reference to the 
effort of the honest or the deceit of the 
cunning pupil. 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 199 

Reference to various methods of 
managing education is a digression, 
and is used only to call attention to the 
value of the kindergarten method — by 
the difference. Menticulture must 
soon become the course of first impor- 
tance in all teaching, in order that edu- 
cation in schools may keep pace with 
the acceleration of progress in other 
things, and it has begun in the so-called 
kindergartens, only to end with the last 
teaching in life, for it soon will be 
recognized as the branch of cultivation 
that is the source of all power and the 
germ of all strength. 

The salaries of teachers cannot be 
too high in comparison with the remu- 
neration awarded to other occupations, 
if the choice of teachers be rightly 
made and not left to the selection of 
depraved professional politics. 

The matter of teaching menticul- 
ture, as being the branch of education 
that is of first importance and as being 
the basis of all learning and of all skill, 



200 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

can only receive mention here, but con- 
sideration of it will be an important 
part of one of the '' Menticulture 
Series," of which this is the first, and 
HappinesSy as found in Forethought 
minus Fearthought, just published, is 
the second. The development of the 
idea of germ-eradication of the deter- 
rents to harmony and growth in the 
individual is necessarily but the begin- 
ning of a sequence. It must continue 
its good influence from individual 
experience out into the community 
comprised within the visual horizon of 
the emancipated individual, and from 
the smaller community still outwards 
to a horizon bounded only by the limits 
of the nation, and finally to the whole 
world. 



TWO SPLENDID EXAMPLES 



TWO SPLENDID EXAMPLES 



HON. WILLIAM J. VAN PATTEN, 

Burlington, Vermont 

One of the most valued endorsements of 
the theory advocated in the foregoing pages 
came from the Hon. W. J. Van Patten, of 
Burlington, Vermont, who purchased two 
thousand copies of the book for distribution 
in his city, one copy to each household, and 
with the object expressed in a personal note 
that was printed and inserted as an inset 
page in the special Burlington edition. The 
note reads as follows: 

PERSONAL NOTE 

Some time in the early part of the year 1896 a 
friend sent me a copy of "Menticulture." I read it 
with interest, and became convinced that I could ap- 
ply its truths to my own life with profit. Experience 
confirmed my faith in the power of its principles to 
overcome many of the most annoying and damaging 
ills that are common to humanity. 

I procured a number of copies from time to time, 
and gave to friends who I felt would appreciate it. 

203 



204 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

The universal testimony to the good which the little 
book did, and the new strength of purpose and will 
it gave to some who were sore beset with the cares 
and worries of life increased my interest and my 
confidence in the truths set forth. 

I formed the idea of making an experiment by 
giving the book a general distribution in our city, to 
see if it would not promote the general good and 
happiness of people. 

I wrote to the author, Mr. Fletcher, and he entered 
into the plan very cordially, and had this special edi- 
tion prepared for me. The object which we hope to 
gain is to turn the thoughts and purposes of those 
whom we reach to the old truths taught by Christ, 
and a determination to live above those evils which 
do so much to make our lives unhappy for ourselves 
and annoying to those about us. 

I would ask, therefore, that you would kindly give 
the book careful and thoughtful reading, and when 
you have opportunity recommend it to your friends. 

W. J. Van Patten. 

Mr. Van Patten is a prominent manufac- 
turer of Vermont, with manufacturing inter- 
ests that extend far into the Great West, and 
was recently Mayor of Burlington for two 
years. He is also prominent in the Chris- 
tian Endeavorer movement, having been the 
first president of the United Society, and 
being at present one of the trustees. He is 
also the president of the Congregational 
Club of Western Vermont. 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 205 

Mr. Van Patten's altruism takes the form 
that is most useful to society, by directing 
its efforts to the Now- Field and to the Here- 
Field. In a conversation with the author, 
which can be quoted as a specimen good 
example without any serious breach of con- 
fidence, he expressed the wish that he, in 
conjunction with other citizens who were 
equally anxious to serve the interests of 
their city, might be instrumental in making 
Burlington the model city of America, and 
the effect of this loyalty on their home sur- 
roundings is evident to even a casual ob- 
server, so that "Beautiful Burlington " is an 
appellation that has already been given the 
city by visitors. Once, when I rode through 
a neat and tidy cottage neighborhood in the 
outskirts of the town, I asked: ** Where are 
your slums situated? " and was answered: 
"This is as near an approach to what you 
mean by the word * slum,' as we have to 
show you." This neighborhood overlooks 
a part of Lake Champlain that is studded 
by numerous wooded islands, beyond which 
rise the terraced peaks of the beautiful Adi- 
rondacks, a view unequaled except by that of 
the famous Inland Sea of Japan, while at the 



2o6 MENTICULTURE 

back the horizon is serrated by the rocky 
summits of the Green Mountains. 

This mention of "Beautiful Burlington" 
is germane to the subject of Menticulture, 
because the efforts that have made the city 
a part of the harmonious beauty of the 
surroundings, and not a reproach by com- 
parison, as frequently happens, have been 
made effective by the germ- eradication of the 
elements of squalor, which process is but a 
sequence of, and stimulant to, harmonious 
habit-of-thought in the individuals who make 
up the community. 

Menticulture is a kindergarten presentation 
of the subject of menticulture, and, as such, 
gives object-lessons of practical usefulness. 



THE BROTHERS PATTERSON 

Dayton, Ohio 

Another splendid example of neighbor- 
hood loyalty — of practical and profitable 
Here and Now altruism — is illustrated by the 
Patterson brothers, of Dayton, Ohio, in mak- 
ing a park of the surroundings of their factory 
premises, the whole extent and beauty 
of which scheme it is impossible even 
to outline here. In brief, they invaded a 
slum with their factory, but instead of con- 
taminating it with a smoke nuisance and 
with untidy surroundings, they secured the 
services of Frederick Law Olmsted, the 
landscape gardener of the World's Colum- 
bian Exposition Grounds, of Central Park, 
New York, and of many other famous parks 
of the United States, to lay out the factory 
premises and surroundings as a model for 
the neighborhood; sent abroad to Japan, 
to Europe, and to different parts of America 
for photographs of streets and parks and 

207 



2o8 A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 

other features of urban decoration; and had 
the pictures thrown on a canvas screen in 
the lecture hall of the quarter. These were 
made useful by means of particulars and 
estimates of cost of home material and 
home labor, made by experts of construc- 
tion. They then offered to the youth of the 
quarter tempting prizes for the best front 
yards, the best back yards, and the best 
vegetable patches. 

In this manner, the slum they invaded 
became pervaded by their altruism until the 
" Slattertown " of old Dayton has become 
the South Park of new Dayton, and is the 
pride of the community. Here, too, was 
applied a practical method of the germ- 
eradication of the elements of squalor. 



PRESS APPRECIATION 



AND 



UNIVERSITY COLLABORATION 



PRESS APPRECIATION 



The Examiner, San Francisco: Sunday Mori^ 
iNG, November 24, 1895 

AN END OF ANGER AND OF WORRY 

THE NEW SCIENCE OF " MENTICULTURE," AND 
WHAT CALIFORNIAN THINKERS SAY OF IT 

A remarkable book, called " Menti culture; 
or the A-B-C of True Living," has recently 
been written by Horace Fletcher, formerly a 
Bohemian Club man of this city, and now 
living in New Orleans. 

All who have seen this book declare that 
it will make a deep impression on the read- 
ing and thinking public. It is a study of 
human passion and the banishment of evil. 
Mr. Fletcher's theory, as declared by him in 
this work, is as follows: 

All of the evil passions are traceable to 
one of two roots. 

Anger is the root of all the aggressive 
passions. 

211 



212 MENTICULTURE 

Worry is the root of all the cowardly 
passions. 

Envy, spite, revenge, impatience, annoy- 
ance, selfishness, prejudice, unrest, and the 
like, are all phases of anger. 

Jealousy, fear, the belittling of self, the 
blues, and all the introspective forms of de- 
pression, are the children of worry. 

Anger and worry are the most unprofi- 
table conditions known to man. While they 
are in possession of the mind, both mental 
and physical growth are suspended. 

Anger and worry are thieves that steal 
precious time and energy from life. 

Anger is a highway robber, and worry is a 
sneak-thief. 

Anger and worry do not stimulate to any 
good end. 

Anger and worry not only dwarf and de- 
press, but sometimes kill. 

Mr. Fletcher's central thought is that the 
banishment of anger and worry is the only 
way that happiness may be secured. He 
calls this the " A-B-C of True Living." 



UNIVERSITY COLLABORATION 



WORRY AND ANGER A MISUSE OF 
POWER 

The President of Leland Stanford, Jr., 
University, David Starr Jordan 

I have read Mr. Horace Fletcher's charm- 
ing little book with much interest. In his 
treatment of anger and worry he uses some- 
what the language of parable rather than 
that of science. The parallelism between 
these evil influences and the bacteria of dis- 
ease is, of course, one of resemblance in 
effect rather than a likeness in nature. 
Worry is simply a misuse of the power " to 
look before and after,*' which is one of the 
sources of man's strength and happiness. 
Anger is a misuse of that power which man 
has of reacting from difficulties and obsta- 
cles. It is a degenerate form of his impulse 
to overcome opposition. Happiness, I take 
it, is the accompaniment of some form of 

213 



214 MENTICULTURE 

activity, doing, struggling, accomplishing, 
living. It is never a passive element, and 
its roots lie in us. It cannot be given by 
outside agencies. "Worry and anger dwarf 
and depress." They interfere with action, 
and therefore with happiness. They are 
states of feeling — normally useful — but in 
a condition of degeneration. They are re- 
lated to their sources, much as dyspepsia is 
to appetite. 

The effective men are still, as in the time 
of Homer, those *' who ever with a frolic 
welcome take the sunshine or the storm." 
The scientific man who knows when a storm 
is brewing, and prepares himself to meet it, 
is not the one who frets over bad weather. 
The trained warrior is not the one who goes 
to pieces in wrath at opposition. 

Anger and worry are conditions of dete- 
rioration. The happy man must be whole 
and wholesome. To be that, one must re- 
press anger and worry as he would fight the 
impulses to lie and steal. He grows stronger 
w \th every victory, for, as the Norse mythol- 
ogy teaches, the strength of the conquered 
goes ever into his veins. 



SEE LIFE AS IT IS, IF YOU WOULD BE 
SERENE AND SANE 

Professor of Ethics, Leland Stanford, Jr., 
University, Edward Howard Griggs 

Anger and worry are wasteful and de- 
structive of life. Dante represents the souls 
of the angry as immersed in a river of black 
mud; and just so is the inner life beclouded 
and befouled by anger. One who sees life 
steadily will not worry; for he knows if he 
be true, even the evil that comes to him may 
be his teacher, and he realizes that in all the 
wide universe there is nothing which can 
cause him fear. 

Anger and worry always result from a 
failure to see life in true perspective. In our 
hurried lives great things and small force 
themselves upon us and seem of equal im- 
portance. Thus, if we would avoid anger 
and worry, we need, above all things, to attain 
that serenity and sanity of mind which 
will enable us to see life as it is. We need 

215 



2 1 6 MENTICULTURE 

some little time each day to be alone and 
think quietly — time when the world can 
drop away from our vision and we can un- 
derstand ourselves. As Wordsworth ex- 
presses it — 

" Every day should have some part 
Free for a Sabbath of the heart." 

All contemplation of the beautiful, whether 
in art or in the infinitely varied face of na- 
ture, helps us to this sanity of spirit. The 
chief value of noble poetry lies in its power 
to lift us out of the narrow and monotonous 
round of daily work and worry into the 
presence of that which partakes of eternity. 
One might say, half paradoxically, that the 
only way to live well in time is to live in the 
presence of eternity. 

If to this serenity of spirit we can add a 
constant devotion, at least of the margin of 
our lives, to some large objective aim, to 
culture, to the service of humanity, and par- 
ticularly to the service of those whose lives 
touch ours most closely, we shall be in little 
danger of falling victims to anger and worry 
and the discordant hosts they lead. 



WORRY IS A COWARD AND ANGER IS 
A TYRANT 

Ray Frank 

The idea embodied in Mr. Fletcher's 
" Menticulture," or " True Living," was used 
by the ancients as a basis for various systems 
of philosophy in defining true happiness, or 
that which was farthest removed from the 
passions, and to which they gave the name of 
" repose." Modern life, infinitely more com- 
plicated, forever multiplying causes, is in- 
finitely farther removed from repose than 
was life among the ancients; but yet has for 
its primary disturbing element the same old 
human passions of anger and worry, though 
it appears to me that there is but one origi- 
nal root — worry, the coward, which gives 
birth to anger, the tyrant. 

It is therefore safe to conclude, with Mr. 
Fletcher, that the present causes of unhappi- 
ness are the ancient roots grown infinite in 
variety, and only by restraining them is there 
an approach to happiness. 

217 



2l8 MENTICULTURE 

To overcome these evils one must first of 
all be free from externals, must act from 
will alone, and, as Epictetus put it. ** One 
should be taught to will only that which con- 
forms to law," and he who conforms to law 
will, from knowledge, " learn to wish that 
everything may happen as it does." Posses- 
sion brings discontent, another name for 
worry. He who has nothing which his 
neighbor covets, and who covets nothing 
which his neighbor has, helps to free him- 
self from external influences opposed to law. 

The truly free man adapts himself to law, 
realizing the nothingness of most things and 
his insignificance of self. The secret of 
adaptation is in the Socratic " Know thy- 
self." To-day, externals govern, not the 
will. Desire, and not knowledge, is the god 
worshiped. They count happiness as some- 
thing which may be purchased with ill-got- 
ten gains. To-day we trust entirely to our 
bodies, and a man, to again quote Epictetus, 
'* ought not to be invincible in the way that 
an ass is," — "know thyself," and thou wilt 
free thyself; free thyself, and happiness is 
thine. 



MR. FLETCHER IS SUPERFICIAL, 
THINKS ONE LADY 

Bertha Monroe Rickoff 

It is difficult to judge of an author with- 
out making a review of his whole work, but 
the quotations you send me pronounce Mr. 
Fletcher as essentially superficial. Anger 
and worry cannot be conquered from the 
surface. Truth is within ourselves, and from 
that inward illumination must arise the out- 
ward action. Unjust anger does not arise 
from without, but from a lack of the percep- 
tion of truth within. There is an anger 
which is just. St. James tells us to be angry, 
and sin not. Herbert Spencer assures us that 
there are moments when we owe it to our 
fellow-men [to disapprove of, but not] to be 
angry with them. There are causes which 
demand [disapproval] anger, as there are 
states of the atmosphere which demand thun- 
der and lightning — anger at the non-fulfill- 
ment of an eternal law. 

3Z9 



220 MENTICULTURE 

But selfish anger arises from a lack of 
sympathy and charity, which is love — a lack 
of the capacity for understanding the mental 
attitude of those about us. Worry also 
arises from a lack of harmony with eternal 
law. We think we can conquer worry by 
force of will, but it can only be subdued by 
our ascending into a higher atmosphere, 
where we are able to look down and compre- 
hend the just proportions of life. 

Again, worry is often caused by the dread 
of a defeat, whereas experience shows that 
a defeat is often but the stepping-stone to a 
higher success than we have dared to hope. 
Worry is the attribute of the gambler in fate, 
who looks to chance for his results. The 
calm of the laboring man is lacking. 

Carlyle says: " It is enough for me that I 
do my work; the result is the care of a 
greater than I." 



THE BAR ALWAYS CONSISTENT 



THE QUESTION ANSWERED BY ASK- 
ING QUESTIONS 

Horace G. Platt 

How can you banish "anger" until you 
banish wrong, injustice, and human nature? 
How can you banish "worry" until you 
banish hope, disappointment, failure, incom- 
petency, bad luck, hate, love, uncertainty? 
How can an angry man be happy, or allow 
any one with whom he comes in contact to 
be happy? How can "worry" and "con- 
tent" be coincident? and how can happiness 
exist without contentment? 

There is no such thing as happiness two 
hours in duration. 

But I am tired and overworked. Your 
letter comes at the wrong time. I am look- 
ing through a glass darkly, and therefore 
prove that your question has to be answered 
only relatively and as present conditions dic- 
tate. 

221 



ANGER IS A KIND OF INSANITY, AND 
WORRY KILLS 

Westwood Wright Case, D.D. 

It is extremely unfair to review a book 
without having first read it, or at least with- 
out having scanned it; yet this is sometimes 
done. As to the two roots of all the evil 
passions indicated by the author of " Menti- 
culture," I am free to say that I think his 
classifications defective and inadequate. 

That anger and worry are two prolific 
sources of disease and evil cannot be denied. 
Anger is a species of insanity, and worry 
kills more people than work; but, as I am 
accustomed to look at the matter, sin is in 
the will, error lies in the judgment, moral 
purpose in the conscience, and feeling in 
the blood or temperament. Conscience is 
net an infallible guide, for the reason \hat 
conscience is not given to us to be a guide. 
Conscience says, " Do right." It is that 
voice back of all other voices in the human 

222 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 223 

soul that demands righteousness; but con- 
science does not determine what is righteous. 
For all light we must go to the judgment or 
perceptive faculties. No person needs to 
be told that he ought to do right, for con- 
science in every human being makes one 
uniform command, and that demand may be 
expressed in the words, " Do right." 

When conscience and judgment and will 
are in harmony, then there is peace and 
happiness in the life. When conscience 
says "Do right," and judgment says "This 
thing is right," but the will refuses to do 
that righteous thing which conscience urges 
him to do, then there is civil war in the 
breast of man, and every sort of evil passion 
may grow and thrive amid the conflicting 
forces. For convenience we may classify 
the faculties of the human soul into intel- 
lectual powers, moral sentiments, and the 
domestic or animal propensities. Without 
a fair development of each of these three 
departments of human nature, the man is a 
monstrosity. Wanting in intellect and 
moral sentiment, he may be the basest of 
animals. 

Without a fair intellect and a good de- 



224 MENTICULTURE; OR, THE 

velopment of the domestic faculties, he may 
easily be the wildest fanatic. Without the 
development of the moral sentiments and 
the domestic propensities, he may be intel- 
lectual, but heartless and cold — a very devil; 
for what is Satan but intellect without con- 
science and love? 

There are no propensities in the constitu- 
tion of man which need be destroyed. Every 
faculty in human nature has its high office 
to perform in the purpose of our Maker. It 
is not the possession of faculties or pro- 
pensities that causes mischief and misery, 
but it is the perversion of these faculties. 
If only the harmonious balance of the facul- 
ties be maintained, every propensity and 
every faculty in the constitution of man will 
do its part faithfully, producing the most 
happy and beautiful results, just as every 
part of the most intricate machinery, when 
in order, performs its own part, and helps 
bring out the perfect pattern or result 
designated. 

The great apostle St. Paul was a psychol- 
ogist of the highest rank, perhaps not 
naturally, but certainly so under divine in- 
spiration. He gave us the highest and 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 225 

clearest utterances concerning the constitu- 
tion of the human soul. He says: " I keep 
my body under; " that is to say, in modern 
nomenclature, " I keep my animal propensi- 
ties subordinated to my moral sentiments." 
When the animal propensities control the 
human life, not only do we see anger and 
worry, but we see selfishness, the source of 
all evil, sitting upon the throne and reigning 
without a rival; then every propensity, un- 
balanced and unrestrained, may run riot, 
and if the temperament be choleric or san- 
guine, the fiery steed, with loose rein, leaps 
and plunges into vice and crime of all de- 
scriptions. 

If I were compelled to express in a single 
word the source of all evil in the human 
constitution, that word would be " selfish- 
ness," which is equivalent to " depravity," 
which in its manifestation often appears to 
be pure " cussedness." As to the remedy 
for human ills, I know of but one, and that 
is the transforming power of the grace of 
God, through the gospel of His Son, by 
which a spiritual resurrection is produced, 
which enthrones God in the soul, subjecting 
everything else in man to His divine and 



2 26 MENTICULTURE 

blessed sway. This is the wisdom from 
above, concerning which the wise man has 
said: " Her ways are ways of pleasantness, 
and all her paths are peace." 



ANGER IS DESTRUCTIVE TO ALL THAT 
IS ATTRACTIVE IN MAN 

Laura de Force Gordon 

It needs no argument to establish the 
fact that anger is absolutely destructive of 
all that is most attractive and lovable in 
human kind. Who does not know that a 
violent temper, frequently indulged in, 
seams and wrinkles the face, gives to the 
eye the furtive glance of the serpent, and 
all too often leads to insanity? Some years 
ago, while visiting a state institution for the 
insane in a New England city, I asked the 
physician in charge what was the most pro- 
lific cause of insanity, and was greatly sur- 
prised at his ready reply, '* An ungovernable 
temper." My recollection is that he esti- 
mated that seventy percent of insanity could 
be traced to that cause. The student of 
pathological sciences is familiar with the 
statement of learned physicians that such 
has been the direct effect of a violent fit of 

227 



228 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

anger upon the physical condition of a 
mother that her nursing babe has been 
thrown into convulsions from imbibing the 
milk from her breast. Nothing can turn a 
home of peace into a sheol of discord so 
quickly as a furious temper. Of course, 
this demon should be banished; and so far as 
Mr. Fletcher has indicated how this may be 
accomplished, he confers a favor upon the 
world. The first step is always in the 
proper care and training of children. They 
should never be permitted to hear a cross or 
angry word. No frown even should ever 
obscure the sunlight of love that ought to 
beam unceasingly upon each tender life in 
its perilous march towards manhood and 
womanhood. Heredity has much to do 
with character, and therefore happiness; 
but environment and opportunity do more. 
Children reflect the words, manners, and 
largely the dispositions of their teachers in 
early life. A violent temper can be subdued 
for a time by fear of punishment. But to 
eradicate it, untiring patience and loving 
tenderness must be the treatment. An 
" ugly temper " was never yet cured by 
blows, and a child subjected to such treat- 



i-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 229 

ment " nurses wrath ;" and if we " sow the 
wind, we reap the whirlwind." The mature 
man and woman can often, by self-discipline, 
undo the evils of youthful training, and tone 
down heredity by curbing angry passions. 
Refuse to act, speak, or think " cross." One 
instant's reflection will often stifle a bitter, 
wrathful word. If the passion of anger is 
thus overcome, it soon grows weak, and in 
time dies for want of exercise. We need 
not trouble to discuss the evils and remedies 
of "worrying." They are Siamese twins. 
We have only to stifle "anger," and "worry " 
will give up the ghost. 

Mr. Fletcher and others who write along 
similar lines but voice the ideas entertained 
by nearly all advanced thinkers upon this 
great truth: That life can be made beautiful, 
and almost indefinitely prolonged, by proper 
regard to dietetics, exercise, dress, and, 
above all, by constant discipline of the will, 
disposition, temper, and every other func- 
tion and attribute which constitute the real 
being. 



YOU MAY SMILE AWAY YOUR 
ANGER, IF YOU WILL 

W. H. V. Raymond, Editor California 
State Text-Books. 

Concerning the subject of Mr. Fletcher's 
book on " The A-B-C of True Living," or, 
rather, concerning the sentences from it 
which you quote, I must speak only in a 
hasty way. These sentences are pregnant 
with suggestions that should not go un- 
heeded. Any observant and reflecting per- 
son of mature years must have noted that 
the extravasation of passion upon motive is 
as fatal to achievement as the extravasation 
of blood upon the brain is fatal to life. 
Bacon's plea for the "white light," which 
he says " is ever the best," must be put far 
to the front and high up among wise and 
healthy doctrines. Motives, in his happy 
phrase, " blooded by the affections," are 
ever liable to produce collisions, injury, and 
wreck. 

230 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 231 

How banish anger and worry from the 
horizon of the soul? It were better to ban- 
ish them from the horizon. Better to keep 
them too far away to tempt us. How? 
Cultivate a quick knowledge of their deso- 
lating nature — a knowledge refined and 
sensitized into an instructive recoil, as from 
the open shaft of an elevator, the projecting 
cliff above a mountain gorge, a runaway 
team, a rushing engine. 

How cultivate such knowledge? Make 
frequent inventories of the losses, misfor- 
tunes, regrets, that have attended and fol- 
lowed the possession of us by these passions; 
note (and these we can more correctly esti- 
mate) the losses borne by others through 
robberies by these outlaws, and as children 
grow to have a horror of drunkenness by a 
picture of its woes, so we may come, by de- 
grees, to live in an atmosphere unfriendly 
to these disturbing agencies. A clean body, 
clean thought, and spotless integrity will be 
found also an amazing help in clearing the 
air. 

But consider these foes already in posses- 
sion. How dislodge them? "Turn in 
upon them the self-acting and regnant will," 



232 MENTICULTURE 

is perhaps the prescription of some stalwart 
Kantian. *' Hurl them out, neck and crop, 
by the royal power of high self-assertion.*' 

Good. But some wills are not regnant. 
Some wills need the aid of strategy — need 
to find "the line of least resistance.'* The 
resisting power of a raging or persistent 
passion against a force applied directly upon 
it is terrific. Is there possible an indirect 
application of the will easier to make — 
within the power of the weaker will to make 
— and which, at the same time, will prove 
effective? I venture to suggest such an 
application. Are you angry? Are you 
worried? Draw all the face muscles in- 
volved in smiling into the direction that 
expresses a smile. Are you angry now? 
Are you worried now? Impossible. Smiles 
may shelter deception, wicked purpose, and 
a great variety of villany, but the whole 
brood of passions that owe their parentage 
to anger and worry will skip from beneath 
the roof-tree of a smile like brownies from 
a daybreak, whether the smile springs from 
the light of a happy spirit or is the structure 
built by an intelligent will. Empiricism? 
Well, try it. 



PRESS COLLABORATION 



PRESS COLLABORATION 



CHICAGO EVENING POST, Oct. 5, 1895 

RoswELL Martin Field 

*' Happiness," says Pope, "is our being's 
end and aim." A century later the pro- 
moters of American independence assented 
to the Declaration, as, many centuries before, 
Marcus Aurelius had given it voice. But 
how to secure that happiness was quite 
another proposition. The philosopher, the 
moralist, the religious teacher and the dog- 
matist each had his recipe, pronounced to 
be more or less infallible, and while it was 
the general consent that the pursuit of hap- 
piness was freely vouchsafed to mankind, 
the methods of arriving at that stage of 
beatitude were either faulty in construction 
or frequently not adapted to the tempera- 
ment of the subject. Plainly the world was 
waiting for suggestions. 

235 



236 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

Down in New Orleans lives a modest 
gentleman, who combines a taste for phi- 
losophy with the general desire for happi- 
ness. According to his own confession he 
was a man built on the ordinary plan of 
human weakness, whose existence for the 
greater part of his days, up to a twelve- 
month ago, was as checkered as is assured 
by the not infrequent assertion of the human 
passions. In a happy moment he spent an 
evening with a gentleman who had lived 
many years in Japan, and who had absorbed 
the tranquil philosophy of that wonderful 

I people. It was during the conversation of 

II that evening that the New Orleans philoso- 
1 1 pher — he is fairlv entitled to the name — 
I \ gained the first hint of the possibility of 

emancipating the mind from the domination 
of the annoying passions and of procuring 
the peace which attends true and practical 
philosophy. The secret, for he is too mod- 
est to claim it as his own discovery, he has 
set forth in a vastly interesting little book 
called Menticulture ; or, The A-B-C of True 
Living, and it is important enough to merit 
careful examination and discussion. Truly, 
Horace Fletcher impresses the reader not 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 237 

less by his own earnestness and simplicity 
than by the ample testimony he offers in 

evidence. 

* * * * 

It [the book] is fascinating to the close, 
and the earnestness of the author and the 
growing belief in the supreme power of 
menticulture must be taken into account 
before this subject is dismissed as a " fad" or 
a temporary school of philosophy. 

* * * * 

It would seem that Mr. Fletcher makes a 
modest but useless apology for not following 
the subject " beyond the elementary stage." 
For is it not the elementary stage that is so 
charming and convincing? Let a long- 
winded metaphysician, with his technical 
phraseology and his never-ending ramifica- 
tions, get hold of the subject, and he will 
speedily plunge the reader into hopeless con- 
fusion. The mere statement of the cure, 
" Get rid of the germs," with the experiences 
in illustration, tells the story far more intel- 
ligently and convincingly, perhaps, than even 
Mr. Fletcher imagines, and whether he 
gains converts to his theory or is unsuc- 
cessful save in occasional instances, he has 



238 MENTICULTURE 

performed his task well and put his case in- 
telligibly before any class of readers who are 
to be benefited. This is the charm of the 
little book: an interesting theory interest- 
ingly set forth. It has commanded the re- 
spect of men of wisdom, and goes forth to 
the great public as the best of counsel from 
a thoughtful and sincere man. 



NEW YORK HERALD, OCT. 13, 1895 

Portions of a short sermon by the Rev. George H. 
Hepworth, D.D., on the text, "Thou Shalt Not 
Worry." "Sufficient Unto the Day Is the Evil 
Thereof." — Matthew vii., 34. 

No man ever suffered more than Christ 
did, and none has been pricked by so many 
thorns. And yet He calmly tells us to 
possess our souls in peace, not to anticipate 
the future; neither to worry about what may 
happen to-morrow, but to bear as best we 
may whatever burden is on our shoulders 
and let the morrow take care of itself. He 
does not speak of this as the best policy to 
pursue, but as an imperative duty imposed 
by the universe and by God, who decreed 
them. What does He mean by this strange 
utterance? Perhaps by searching we may 
find out. 

Worry, to begin with, is useless. It pro- 
duces no good result. On the contrary, it 
is utterly destructive in its nature. So far 
from preparing you to overcome disaster, it 

239 



240 MENTICULTURE 

renders you unfit to meet it. It debilitates 

the soul and robs you of the very strength 

which you pray for, because you see it will 

\ j be needed. To worry is to endure an agony 

I / before its time, and so prolong your misery. 
/ [ * * * * 

It is profitable for you to so far anticipate 
the effect of a given cause that you prepare 
to meet it, but when you have done all that 
can be done it is exceedingly unprofitable to 
so weaken yourself by worry that the coming 
sorrow is doubled in weight. As much as 
lies in your power — and it is a quality of 
character which admits of great develop- 
ment — live in to-day. Cultivate a quiet and 
peaceful frame of mind. He did it, and was 
undisturbed by threatening circumstance, 
and you may follow. What you are doing 
now calls for all your strength, and if 
there is more to follow, then the additional 
strength will be given. God's providence is 
both wide and tender, and the more you 
trust in it the sweeter will be your life, the 
brighter will be your hope, the fairer will be 
your general outlook, and the nearer will 
heaven seem to you. " Sufficient unto the 
day is the evil thereof." 



NEW YORK HERALD, OCT. 19, 1895 
George H. Hepworth, D.D. 

It is a pleasure to come upon a book 
which is entirely out of the beaten track. I 
happen to have one at hand, a small volume 
of less than one hundred and fifty pages, 
and I have read it with mingled emotions, 
consisting partly of entire agreement with 
the writer and partly of dissent. 

* * * * 

Now, what is the conclusion reached? 
Why, that you can get wholly rid of worry 
and anger, and thereby double the happiness 
of life. * * It is worth trying for, and this 
little book has a quantity of good advice in 
it. You nervous people who want to carry 
the whole world on your shoulders, you rest- 
less folk who are constantly quarreling with 
fate and fortune, you misanthropes who see 
the cloud but never the silver lining, read 
Menticulture and ponder its many truths. 
You will not be wholly pleased with it, bu(; 

2^1 



242 MENTICULTURE 

assuredly you will be greatly interested, and 
the chances are that you will look yourself 
over more carefully, and reach the convic- 
tion that you have wasted a good deal of 
time and energy in useless worry. 



BOSTON BUDGET, OCT. 6, 1895 

Lilian Whiting. 
* * * * 

It is eradication and not repression that 
Mr. Fletcher enjoins. In this he is right. 
No one can read thoughtfully the history 
of the past without realizing how far an ad- 
vance in spiritual evolution the present cen- 
tury and the present generation have made 
over that of past ages. Humanity grows 
constantly finer, truer, nobler. The next 
step is to clearly perceive that faults, errors, 
defects of conduct are not necessary; that 
it is no more necessary to be angry or irri- 
table than it is to steal or to tell falsehoods. 
All people above the grade of the criminal 
classes would indignantly resent the thought 
that they could be dishonest, or directly 
and maliciously false in statements, while 
they accept, as a matter of course, ill-tem- 
per, impatience, irritation, vexation, what- 
ever its forms, and they are anxious, sus- 

243 



244 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

picious, worried, perplexed, variously and 
perhaps almost constantly to a greater or less 
degree. All this is really just as unneces- 
sary as theft or falsehood would be. There 
is a better way. 

Now the very moment that one clearly 
and earnestly realizes that anger and worry 
and all their attendant train of variations 
and shades are unnecessary — utterly and 
absolutely unnecessary — he has taken the 
initial step toward his emancipation. If 
each and every one could do this, nine- 
tenths of the tangles of the world would be 
straightened out at once. * * * 

For one thing, here is a great conserva- 
tion of energy. The amount of strength 
wasted in worry, in vexation, in worrying 
not only over things that have happened, 
but over things that possibly might but 
probably never will — is something appall- 
ing. 

" Some of our griefs we can cure, 

And the sharpest we still may survive, 
But what pangs of distress we endure 
From the evils that never arrive." 

Many that do arrive are called into ex- 
istence by worry, by fret, by utterly un- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 245 

necessary anxiety, while, had the same 
expenditure of energy been made in send- 
ing out thoughts of radiant and noble and 
exalted anticipation, the results would have 
been of that order. 

One makes the magnetic connection 
with whatever great sphere of thought he 
allies himself. Order, calmness, serenity 
and sweetness connect one who habitually 
holds his feelings with that realm of life; 
while fret and irritation connect him just 
as surely with all the realm of torment and 
torture. By this magnetic law one becomes 
possessed of not only his own harmony, or 
discord, as may be, but a vast and indeed 
unlimited reservoir of the one or the other 
is laid open to his life. 

People talk much of needing rest. As 
a rule, they do not need rest at all, in the 
sense of cessation from work, but they need 
serenity and poise. A man does not gain 
time, but loses it, by beginning his work in 
a nervous hurry. Let him sit down quietly 
and alone and collect his forces, assert his 
spiritual supremacy, and then shall he go 
to his task with a concentration of power 
that is effective. Circumstances are pliant 



246 MENTICULTURE 

to spiritual power; they are controlled en- 
tirely by spiritual force. Realizing this 
truth is to gain a working hypothesis, by 
means of which life is rendered clear, direct 
and effective. 

Truly, it is an era, a spiritual crisis in life, 
when we can simply and clearly realize that 
anger and worry are no more necessary, no 
more inevitable, than theft and falsehood. 
Believe and love. Recognize only the 
good. It is the secret of all success, of all 
happiness, of all Divine life. 



TOLEDO SATURDAY BLADE 
NOV. i6, 1895 

Emily S. Bouton 

It was Aristotle, I think, who declared 
that the passions are habits of the mind, and 
can be gotten rid of as physical habits are 
gotten rid of. 

The same thought has been expressed in 
many ways by the thinkers upon the true 
philosophy of life, but while the idea is 
accepted there are comparatively few who 
go systematically at work to carry it out. 
People do not recognize the fact that when 
angry, for instance, they are using real 
material forces, unseen because upon the 
mental plane, until their efforts become 
visible upon the physical plane. If we could 
hold that thought, remembering that every 
time we put these forces in motion we are 
adding to their powers, life would seem 
something very different from what it does 
now, even in its physical expression. 

247 



248 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

The growth of a faith in the possibility 
of governing, to a large extent, the circum- 
stances upon the outward plane through 
right thought scientifically directed, is evi- 
dent in the literature of the day. We find it 
everywhere, and where a few years ago it 
was passed over carelessly or with a smile of 
incredulity, it is read now with attention and 
more or less belief, according to the reader's 
understanding of the mental and spiritual law 
upon which it is founded. 

I picked up a little book to-day which has 

just been issued, entitled *' Menticulture; 

or, The A-B-C of True Living," by Horace 

Fletcher, which is in evidence of what I have 

been saying. 

* * * * 

\y^ I think there is no doubt that this [the 
contention of MenticultureJ is true. When 
anger has control, the voice of the Higher 
Self cannot be heard; consequently there is 
no upward aspiration, and hence no spiritual 
progress. Mental balance, too, is always 
lost, as we know; therefore no intellectual 
growth is possible. Every part of the phys- 
ical body is by anger put under a strain, its 
processes violently interrupted and changed, 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 249 

so that the renewal of its parts, which makes 
for health, is impossible. All this is the 
absolute result of every fit of anger upon the 
individual who is angry, to say nothing of 
the destructive forces started upon the 
unseen thought plane that will affect others; 
for it is absolutely true that we cannot stand 
alone, we cannot limit the evil done to our- 
selves, for every thought as well as every 
action has a propulsive force towards others 
that we cannot measure. * * * 

Viewed both from a scientific and philo- 
sophic standpoint, emancipation from these 

passions is possible and necessary. 
* * * * 

The little volume is one to attract and 
hold the attention of many who have not 
hitherto studied the real philosophy of life 
and its purpose — the constant evolution 
toward the Divine. Not that the author has 
discovered anything new, but he simply 
puts in another way the fact that mental and 
spiritual growth are the product of our own 
efforts, and that the difficulties in our path 
are mostly the result of what, rightly under- 
stood, may be wholly swept away. 



CHICAGO INTERIOR, OCT. 3, 1895 

EDITORIAL TOPICS 

ANGER AND WORRY 

It is not to the discredit of new things 
that they are old. They are more attractive 
when novelty is combined with antiquity. 
Men have ever been studying the great prob- 
lem of life — the best way to live and the best 
way to dull the tooth of pain, and the way 
to make the most good and the least evil of 
everything. The old Greeks made a philos- 
ophy of their thinking along this line, and 
called it stoicism. They gave up the idea 
of making little of evil and much of good, 
because making much of good would, in 
spite of them, make much also of evil. 
Therefore, they said: " Let there be neither 
evil nor good." We can attain this by sup- 
pressing the passions. At the same time 
Gautama was teaching the same thing in 
India. The Christian church followed the 
same idea and instituted Monasticism, so 

250 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 25 1 

that the stoical philosophy became and re- 
mains world-wide. To one who has not no- 
ticed particularly, it will cause surprise to 
observe how prevalent this idea is among 
people who never heard of Greek philoso- 
phy. It is the disposition to make the best 
of everything, and to be as indifferent as 
possible to misfortunes and troubles of any 
kind. No people are more successful in this 
than the American Indian. 

Our attention is called to this subject by 
a little book of practical stoicism, by Mr. 
Horace Fletcher, called Menticulture. 
* * * * 

We are not disposed to criticize the 
author for going to the antipodes for the 
philosophy of ^eus, Socrates and Marcus 
Aurelius, more especially as the observa- 
tions of more familiar philosophers seem to 
have been overlooked by him. There is a 
pretty large literature of it in the Bible, be- 
ginning, we will say, with David's " Fret 
not thyself, to do evil," including Job's re- 
marks to an angry man that he was only 
teasing himself — that the earth would not 
be forsaken nor the rocks flee away because 
thereof; Solomon's remark that a man slow 



252 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

to anger is better than the mighty, and that 

anger resteth in the bosom of fools; and our 

Lord on the eradication of anger, which 

must not be suffered to live to the going 

down of the sun. Rather, we would thank 

him for the cogency and freshness of his 

little treatise. He makes many good and 

true points. Anger is weakness, not strength ; 

it is a paralysis. 

* * * * 

All of which is true. There is no root of 
bitterness so bitter as malice. It gives the 
heart that cherishes it incessant pain. As 
for worry, it is subject to the will. One can 
by a single effort resolve to banish it, and 
to take hold of the cause of his or her trou- 
ble with a calm and placid mind, to make 
the best of it. There are, however, excep- 
tional conditions. Anger and worry are 
symptoms of weakness, and this weakness 
may come of nerve exhaustion. This may 
be produced by overwork. A day of men- 
tal overwork is pretty certain to be followed 
by a night of irritability and worry. So also, 
protracted pain, neuralgic or other, produces 
fretfulness and gloom. Everyone has 
noticed the difference of the condition of 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 253 

his or her mind before or after a night of 
refreshing sleep. Narcotics and stimulants 
produce the condition of anger and worry. 
And yet it must be said that they are habits. 
The weakened mind and nerves fall into 
them as well-worn and familiar channels. 
Weakness does not necessarily, by any 
means, find expression in them. On the 
contrary, there are many instances in which 
pain, over-exhaustion, and even the physical 
decline of old age, develop the most beauti- 
ful sweetness, placidity, and love. 

The conclusion of the whole matter is 
this: Let us all try it, and try it our best. 
Let us be on our guard against anger and 
worry. Let us seek to help ourselves 
against them by occupying the mind with 
better things. And the best and most help- 
ful of all better things is a habit of confi- 
dence, and repose, under the loving shelter 
of God. 



SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE 
AUGUST 7, 1892 

THE WORST OF ALL 

Everything in this world is necessarily 
measured by comparison, and yet there are 
some things of which it can be predicated 
that they are absolutely bad, having no sin- 
gle redeeming quality, and of this category 
the very worst of all is worry. 

It should be said that worry, as used in 
this sense, does not mean those petty and 
temporary annoyances to which we all are 
subject, and which are to be classed among 
the light afflictions of the apostle. By 
worry we mean the habit of allowing one's 
self to be really and seriously troubled over 
all sorts of matters, grave or light, serious 
or insignificant, until the person into whom 
the demon of worry has entered becomes 
completely subject to the fiend and loses 
moral-fiber, self-control, will-power, and per- 
sonal independence. 

254 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 255 

Worry is very much the creature of habit, 
like a great many of our other vices, great 
and small, and the habit of worry is cumu- 
lative. It grows apace by what it feeds 
upon, until, to adopt the expressive Hiber- 
nicism, a person is never happy unless he is 
thoroughly miserable. To the chronic 
worrier, if the word be permissible, no joy 
is complete unless he can discover the drop 
of bitterness in the bottom of the cup; no 
rose is lovely unless the canker-worm lies 
hidden in its petals; no scene is beautiful 
unless he can imagine destruction or ruin 
brooding over it. To his jaundiced eye 
everything which most people admire or es- 
teem is but a whited sepulcher, full of dead 
men's bones and all uncleanness, and every 
object in life, however harmless or innocent, 
appears to him to conceal some hidden dan- 
ger, some man-trap or spring gun set to 
catch or wound the unwary. 

The strange thing about worry is that it is 
so utterly illogical. The laughing philoso- 
pher who pronounced his dictum on worry 
so many years ago that his name and era 
have been forgotten was exactly right. He 
said that there are two classes of things that 



256 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

one should not worry over, the things that 
can be helped and the things that cannot — 
for, he said, if they can be helped, go and 
help them; if they cannot, worrying over 
them only makes them worse. 

We read sometimes of men dying from 
overwork, especially those whose work is 
that of the brain. It is ninety-nine times 
out of a hundred a mistaken diagnosis. 
Men die of over-eating, of over-drinking, of 
over-indulgence in various ways, and, more 
frequently than all, of worry, but not of too 
much work. The brain is a tough and elas- 
tic organ, capable of almost any amount of 
work if it be treated properly; but when to 
work is superadded worry, the brain refuses 
to bear the double burden, and then ensues 
that surcease from labor which we call death. 
Work can be finished and put away: worry, 
never. Work produces fatigue: worry, ex- 
haustion. Work, no matter how arduous or se- 
vere, does not detract from one's self-respect; 
worry makes him think as meanly of him- 
self as of all the rest of the world. We can 
bear disease, pain, ill-fortune, all the ills that 
flesh is heir to, if we do not worry; if we 
do, every molehill becomes a mountain, and 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 257 

every squeaking mouse a roaring lion in our 
path. Is not worry, then, the worst of all bad 
things — the one incurable disease, the mal- 
ady which physic cannot heal nor science 
alleviate? 



NEW ORLEANS TIMES-DEMOCRAT 
OCTOBER 6, 1895 

The discovery that that conquest of self, 
which has been so constantly urged upon the 
race by its sages and philosophers since the 
dawn of civilization, is neither an idle dream 
nor a sublime achievement possible to only 
a few specially endowed natures, is a great 
event in the life of any individual, and one 
well worthy of being published abroad; and 
in yielding so generously to the impulse to 
induct others into the knowledge of the more 
excellent way Mr. Fletcher has found he has 
given a conclusive proof of the sincerity of 
his conviction which adds might to his testi- 
mony. 

* * * * 

There is not, however, the slightest ques- 
tion as to the evil effects wrought of anger 
and worry, and the importance of casting 
them out and cultivating in their place the 
graces of faith, hope, and charity. The un- 
profitableness of anger was recognized by 

258 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 259 

sages who lived and taught in Israel long 
before Buddha was born, and many of their 
admonitions concerning them have been 
garnered up in the Old Scriptures. 
" Cease from anger and forsake wrath." 
" Fret not thyself; it only tendeth to evil 
doing." 
says the psalmist. In that collection of 
maxims for the practical conduct of life, 
which was formerly so highly esteemed as to 
be styled comprehensively "Wisdom," as if 
in it all desirable knowledge were summed 
up, the folly of indulging in anger is fre- 
quently pointed out: 

. "He that is soon angry will deal fool- 
ishly." 

" He that is slow to anger is of great un- 
derstanding." 

" A soft answer turneth away wrath. 
But a grievous word stirreth up strife." 
" He that is slow to anger is better than 
the mighty, 

And he that ruleth his spirit than he that 
taketh a city." 

" A wrathful man stirreth up contention, 
but he that is slow to anger appeaseth 
strife." 



26o MENTICULTURE 

" The discretion of a man maketh him 
slow to anger, 

And it is his glory to pass over a trans- 
gression." 

" It is an honor to a man to keep away 
from strife; 

But every fool will be quarreling." 

" Make no friendship with a man that is 
given to anger, and with a wrathful man thou 
shalt not go." 

So counsel the ** Proverbs;" and the 
" Preacher " adds his voice: " Be not hasty 
in thy spirit to be angry; for anger resteth 
in the bosom of fools." 



SAN FRANCISCO ARGONAUT 

An eminent medical authority discredits 
the theory that men (or women either) 
break down from overwork. He says the 
brain does its work with the minimum 
of effect; that with due nutriment and rest 
in sleep it can work continuously during 
working hours, and that, instead of being 
injured by severe labor, it is improved by 
it if the labor is done under normal condi- 
tions. "When a man says he is suffering 
from the effects of mental overwork," adds 
this authority, " the wise physician wants to 
know what his vices are. Worry may be 
one. The worries of life do infinitely more 
harm than the work of life, however onerous 
it may be." 



PITTSBURG (PA.) LEADER, OCT. 12, 1895 

If you have ever exercised the intro- 
spective faculty so as to compare your sen- 
sations and their effects under the influence 
of various emotions, you have no doubt 
found that anger and worry were very de- 
pressing. Anger would act as an intoxicant 
to you. After its excitement passed away 
you felt that you had been left the worse 
for it. Sometimes under the influence of 
this psychic "next morning" you may even 
have wondered if anger could not be dis- 
pensed with. You have acknowledged that 
it did not pay. Worry is not exciting in 
the same way as anger. Anger is a psychic 
brandy: worry is a mental morphine. 



NEW ORLEANS TIMES-DEMOCRAT 
JANUARY 26, 1896 

Helen Pitkin 

Our Mr. Horace Fletcher has written a 
book which we all have read, emphasizing 
the value of calmness and its importance to 
health. " Don't worry and don't get angry," 
is the substance of his message to us. It 
means to all who will seriously undertake to 
practice this cheerful philosophy a divided 
increase in the world's jollity. Whatever 
else we forget we must remember to be gay. 

Don't forget to laugh. Laugh when you 
are happy, laugh when you are amused, 
laugh at yourself for being miserable, and 
laugh at yourself for being bored. There is 
always something to laugh at; and even 
when one is reduced to laughing at one's 
self, that is very much better than to be 
"glum." 

This is what laughter does for a woman: 
It keeps her heart young. It makes her like 

263 



264 MENTICULTURE 

people for the sake of the pleasure they give 
her, and they, in turn, like her. It makes 
her step buoyant. It keeps her eyes bright. 
It keeps her face from wrinkling. It is a 
beatific second to no other one. It does for 
the muscles of the face what exercise does 
for those of the body — keeps them supple 
and prevents them from falling into those 
stiff and settled lines which mean old age. 

There is no situation in life, except, of 
course, the inevitable tragic moments, that 
may not be bettered by laughter. It is hard 
to burlesque one's griefs and annoyances, but 
it can be done, and it is worth doing. To 
travesty one's emotions and to make a 
mockery of one's annoyances may not seem 
to be the highest form of philosophy, but it 
is not so low a one as to fret over trials and 
grow pessimistic over personal woes. 



MEDICAL COLLABORATION 



MEDICAL COLLABORATION 



OFFICE OF THE 

MIDDLETOWN STATE HOMCEOPATHIC 
HOSPITAL 

MiDDLETOWN, OrANGE Co., N. Y. 

January 20, 1896 
Mr. Horace Fletcher. 

My Dear Sir: — Please accept my thanks 
for your kind letter under date of the 13th 
inst., together with a copy of Menticulture, 
which I shall greatly prize because you sent 
it to me. 

A good many of the causes given for an 
attack of insanity, by friends or relatives of 
the patient, such as business trouble, death 
of various members of the family and friends, 
and any source of mental anxiety, have in 
them a large element of worry, and can be 
considered as belonging under that head. 
One hundred and twenty of such cases can 
be added to the two hundred and eighty- 
five^ making four hundred and five, or about 

267 



268 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

twenty-five per cent, of the total. The " un- 
ascertained" represents those from whom no 
satisfactory history can be obtained, either 
from their friends, when they have any, or 
themselves. Worry may enter even more 
into their insanity than the others — being a 
worm in the bud of their mental rose. 

The department of mental hygiene has 
been enriched by the publication of Menti- 
culture — the value of which lies in the sim- 
plicity of the method advocated and the 
principle and nature of its teachings. 
Throughout, the author is appreciative of 
the importance of his subject, earnest in the 
advocacy of its merits, and clear in its pre- 
sentation. There is no class of society that 
cannot be helped by this book, whether you 
view its influence from a religious, moral, or 
intellectual standpoint, and those who wish 
to develop self-control can be aided by read- 
ing Menticulture. 

I enclose a clipping from the New York 
Herald, which shows that the Rev. Dr. Hep- 
worth appreciates the subject. 

With regards, believe me, 

Very cordially yours, 

C. Spencer Kinney. 



A^B-C OF TRUE LIVING 269 

[The following article on " Worry," by 
Dr. Kinney, was published in the annual re- 
port of the hospital in the year 1893.] 



WORRY 

BY DR. C. SPENCER KINNEY 

Long after the visitor has left the Bank 
of England he will recall a small machine, 
insignificant in its size and general appear- 
ance, and yet to which is intrusted the 
responsibility of protecting the bank from 
reissuing light-weight sovereigns. As these 
coins slide down an inclined trough they 
drop on a weighing pan for an instant, and, if 
of proper weight, fall to the right, and once 
more pass into trade; but if they have lost 
too much of their substance by the wear and 
tear of the world's usage, they slide to the 
left, where with a half split and a twist the 
commercial life of the piece terminates. 
While this mechanical contrivance is de- 
pendent upon the proper adjustment of its 
parts, and the avoidance of any interfering 
agency, it is aided in separating the true 
weight from the light weight coins by a 



270 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

qualified human intellect presiding over it. 
He sees to it that oil of the right quality 
and amount is supplied, at proper intervals 
of time, to needed parts. All that ripened 
experience has found necessary for the ma- 
chine it receives; and thus is capable of per- 
forming the object for which it was designed, 
until symmetrically worn out. A little dust, 
or neglect on the part of the one in charge, 
is enough to impair its usefulness. Conse- 
quently, great care is taken to see that every 
part works in harmony with every dependent 
part. Unless all this is done, the machine 
is a failure. 

Human beings are like this machine to a 
certain degree. They must choose through 
life between right and wrong, and on their 
proper decision depends the extent of their 
usefulness. As in the machine, a number of 
dissimilar parts work harmoniously to ac- 
complish a given object, so do the diversified 
qualities composing the human mind unite 
for a common purpose. As dust and friction 
are to the machine, so is worry to the mind. 
While the machine must have human help 
to look after its needs, a human being is 
supposed to be endowed with tnose quali- 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 27 1 

ties of mind that enable him to direct all 
the powers which he may possess, with a due 
amount of judgment. 

Now the physical, mental, and moral capa- 
cities of different individuals vary in every 
possible degree as do the nature and quali- 
ties of machines, and the use to which they 
can best be applied. All this we expect. 
With one whose mental faculties work in 
harmony, and who, in addition to this, is pos- 
sessed of excellent physical health, and is 
engaged in a congenial pursuit, worry does 
not find a ready lodgment. If we consider, 
on the other hand, the thousands who are 
handicapped by too much of this mental 
faculty or too little of that to constitute a 
really healthy mind, we shall come to the 
consideration of that class of unfortunates 
with whom worry has most to do. 

A machine is only able to sustain a strain 
that is equal to the strength of its weakest 
part; so it is with the strength of a human 
being. As worry is a strain that is always 
plus the legitimate effort necessary to ac- 
complish any given purpose, it follows that 
whenever indulged in the nervous energy 
of the patient is more quickly exhausted. 



272 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

With many, there is a nervous disposi- 
tion to degeneration o.f some organ or set of 
organs that, with care, might never become 
diseased, and, consequently, worry is to be 
avoided as wholly as if it represented the 
worst of all dissipation. As worry creates 
certain symptoms, they should be heeded, 
not ignored, as they are danger signals that 
nature throws out to intelligence. Nowa- 
days, we recognize that an eye strain induces 
an irritability of disposition, causes head- 
ache, changes the facial expression, and pro- 
duces a lack of muscular co-ordination that 
'^nferferes with one's occupation. As soon 
as these symptoms are discovered, properly 
adjusted glasses remedy the difficulty. This 
condition of affairs or similar hindrances to 
good work, we must recollect, lead to worry 
and produce an effect throughout the entire 
nervous system. This must be kept in mind 
constantly in reference to worry — that bad 
results follow long-continued worry as surely 
as destruction to the machine follows the 
use of sand in its bearings instead of oil. 

While heredity lays a heavy hand on her 
victims, restraining them from assuming cer- 
tain risks in life to which would be attached 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 273 

serious penalties, predisposition, insidious 
and far-reaching, is even more dangerous. 
Caused, as it is, by subtle methods of vio- 
lating nature's laws, by ancestors remote as 
well as near, by injuries and by circumstances 
with which the powerless victim is buffeted, 
it broadly lays the foundation for worry's 
work. 

The injunction to " Know thyself" is an 
ancient one, and, thanks to the wide teach- 
ings of the press, objectionable as it some- 
times is, preventive medicine is becom- 
ing better understood, and good results 
may be expected. But we must go further 
and look upon the mental faculties of the 
growing child as something that has an ex- 
istence, something that can be trained with 
benefit to the child, not alone for the present 
time, but to the advantage of his entire 
lifetime. 

Mental philosophy has for years been 
taught by those who do not appreciate it, 
from text-books written by those who did 
not comprehend the subject. Words have 
effectively concealed the paucity of thought, 
and practical applications have been forgot- 
ten by the pupil in acquiring befogging defi- 



274 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

nitions. The delusion that all. men are born 
equal has been a costly delusion of many- 
teachers and parents, the results showing in 
the children, who exemplify in their lives the 
mistakes resulting from wrong training. As 
well might we expect all machines to per- 
form the same kind of work, simply because 
they happen to be machines, as to expect all 
human beings to develop as they should, and 
as nature may have endowed them, by meth- 
ods of so-called teaching, in which routine 
and dull uniformity are the leading objects 
of the course. Education, to be worth any- 
thing, should be an individualized one. What 
is easily taught one child is with difficulty 
acquired by another. Threats will not de- 
velop the dull, and yet tact and knowledge 
on the part of the teacher may bring out 
faculties of comprehension in certain lines 
of thought which the bright pupil may never 
attain. Continued efforts to bring them both 
up to a certain preconceived standard, with- 
out reference to the developing of personal 
resources, may do life-long harm to both, by 
teaching them early in life how to worry. 
Taught as mental philosophy should be, it 
would inculcate a practical knowledge of 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 275 

one's mental armamentarium, the limit of 
power, and the extent of his mental resources. 
Without such a knowledge, one's existence 
assumes a happy-go-lucky gait that no power 
outside that of the Divine Ruler can save 
from coming to grief. Sporadic attempts 
are made on a small scale to teach children 
self-control by some parents and teachers, 
but seldom does this go beyond cautioning 
them regarding outbursts of temper and 
the exhibition of some unpleasant quality. 
Now, mental tendencies show in early life as 
quickly as do unfortunate manners and cor- 
rupt speech. An overstrain on the mental 
faculties of the child shows itself a so-called 
nervousness, and should this not be checked 
it will result in laying the foundation of 
disease. 

It is a sad commentary on the vaunted 
wisdom of our kind that the appreciation 
and care of the most exalted faculties we 
possess, from which our chief enjoyments 
spring, should be so little understood. Much 
of this comes from ignorance directly due to 
wrong teaching and indifference. What is 
not comprehended by their grosser sense 
is of no interest, and the idea that worry 



276 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

could be productive of injury in any degree 
would not be accepted. It is not understood 
that mental defects, like physical ones, limit 
one in the performance of any task. 

There is no faculty of the human mind 
that worry does not affect. There is no organ 
of the human body that it may not destroy. 
It dwarfs the intellect of the child, substi- 
tutes doubt for hope, and turns the days of 
childhood into periods that are recalled in 
after years with sorrow and condemnation. 
In youth and middle age it foils, or puts 
in jeopardy, every effort of the ambitious, 
makes failure expected, and success a sur- 
prise. It is found smiling over the open 
grave of the suicide. 

Old age is anticipated by worry's victim, 
and with a mass of broken efforts, blighted 
hopes, and here and there a splinter of am- 
bition, he awaits the development of his last 
predisposition. 

Men of mediocre ability are more easily 
irritated, more easily made suspicious and 
exacting, than are those possessing a greater 
mental grasp or equipoise. The first re- 
lapse into worry is a natural result of nerv- 
ous overstrain. The latter throw it off by 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 277 

pursuing a new train of thought. The 
ignorance of all that worry is able to 
accomplish in blocking human efforts is 
daily seen among the patients entering 
our state hospitals. One is said to have 
lost interest in his business and become 
insensible to his family or friends, com- 
plaining that what was once a source of 
pleasure to him now produces indifference 
or disgust. Pain is experienced about the 
head, irritability is marked, memory fails, 
the stomach seems to have given up work 
especially on certain articles of food, nutri- 
tion is impaired; depression in spirits as well 
as loss of physical strength becomes pro- 
nounced, the bowels grow inactive, and 
there is a drying up of all mucous surfaces, 
and sleeplessness sets in. With these symp- 
toms alone, the patient is well advanced 
toward acute melancholia. 

Now, with one temperament worry may 
induce melancholia; yet in another it may 
culminate in a sharp attack of mania or 
resolve itself into a case of paranoia. With 
those who are ambitious, hard-working, 
genial men, inclined to carry forty pound^s 
of strain when their limit is thirty-five 



278 MENTICULTURE ; OR, THE 

pounds working force, worry gets in her 
fine work, and general paresis claims her 
own. This point must be kept in mind: As 
sand is in the bearings of fine machinery, so 
is worry when it begins to impede human 
toil. A few years ago, we are told by those 
having wide experience with the negro, that 
he did not have that form of mental disease 
we recognize as general paresis. The state- 
ment was probably true then, but it is not 
now; for since he has become endowed with 
the uncertain privileges of the franchise, and 
discovered that he is a wage-earner, with all 
the anxieties incident to efforts of self-sup- 
port confronting him, it has drawn his atten- 
tion from a life of carelessness to one having 
that disintegrating, disease-breeding element 
of worry with which white people have had 
so long to deal. The fact of his having from 
all time subjected himself, through racial 
inclination, to every form of dissipation that 
has the reputation of producing the disease, 
was not recognized by those who were the 
exponents of the excess theories. Excesses 
are less liable to lead to disease than worry, 
as the recuperation is likely to follow the for- 
mer, while the tendency of the latter is to 



A-B-C OF TRUE LIVING 279 

produce pronounced enfeeblement. Their 
effect upon the affections is different. In 
the victim of excesses, the ties of kindred 
are held dear, and the relationship to the 
family is appreciated, but the ability to cor- 
rect the habit is tripped by a demented will. 
Worry, however, goes deeper, and paralyzes 
the affections to the extent of apathy. The 
victim of worry sees with unconcern the 
pained faces of his family as they part from 
the husband and father for the advantages 
of hospital care. Their tears are remem- 
bered with no pang, and he readily accus- 
toms himself to the selfish contemplation of 
his own case. He now appreciates his situ- 
ation only in a vague way, and he does not 
keenly suffer on account of the change in 
his affairs. 

Worry is first and last a depressant. It 
may excite for a time, but only as an irritant, 
followed by depression of the organ excited. 
It cannot coexist with perfect health. It acts 
as a ball and chain on the activities of every 
human impulse. In connection with its influ- 
ence upon the mental powers, functional de- 
rangement of the heart, stomach, and the 
effect on these organs, may extend to every 



28o MENTICULTURE 

other. We may speculate as to the method 
worry pursues in order to accomplish its 
object, by blaming the liver as one cause, 
the sympathetic nervous system as another; 
but the truth remains that worry creates a 
slow, sluggish fever in which the moisture of 
the entire body is generously drawn upon. 
In those diseases in which worry acts as an 
exciting cause, the long-continued exalted 
temperature tells the story of the life-con- 
suming fire. One sees it in the early history 
of the melancholiac, and he becomes con- 
vinced of it as he views the burned-out tissue 
of the paretic. 

There is but one advice to give on this 
subject. Don't worry. It has never given 
bread to the hungry, money to the needy; 
yet it has taken bread from the mouths of 
thousands and rendered penniless those who 
once possessed wealth. To undo, but not to 
build up; to allow to sink, with no effort to 
sustain; to kill, rather than save — is its one 
desire. It never has helped a man, and it will 
not help you. It is easy to begin but hard 
to stop. You may imagine that you possess 
strength to begin, to continue, and to stop 
when you will ; but don't begin. 



Explanation of The A. B. C. 
Life Series 

THE ESSENTIALS AND SEQUENCE IN LIFE 

It would seem a considerable departure 
from the study of menticulture as advised 
in the author's book, " Menticulture," to 
jump at once to an investigation of the 
physiology and psychology of nutrition of 
the body and then over to the department 
of infant and child care and education as 
pursued in the creche and in the kinder- 
garden ; but as a matter of fact, if study 
of the causation of human disabilities and 
misfortunes is attempted at all, the quest 
leads naturally into all the departments of 
human interest, and first into these primary 
departments. 

The object of this statement is to 
link up the different publications of the 
writer into a chain of consistent sugges- 
tions intended to make life a more simple 



'Explanation of The A. B. C. hife Series 

and agreeable problem than many of us 
too indifferent or otherwise inefficient and 
bad fellow-citizens make of it. 

It is not an altogether unselfish effort 
on the part of the author of the A. B. C. 
Life Series to publish his findings. In the 
consideration of his own mental and physi- 
cal happiness it is impossible to leave out 
environment, and all the units of humanity 
who inhabit the world are part of his and 
of each other's environment. 

It would be rank presumption for any 
person, even though gifted with the means 
to circulate his suggestions as widely as 
possible, and armed with the power to 
compel the reading of his publications, 
to think that any suggestions of his could 
influence any considerable number of his 
fellow-citizens of the world, or even of his 
own immediate neighbourhood, to accept 
or follow his advice relative to the man- 
agement of their lives and of their com- 
munal and national affairs ; but while the 
general and complete good of humanity 
should be aimed at in all publications, 
one's immediate neighbours and friends 



'Explanation of The A. B. C. Life Series 

come first, and the wave of influence 
spreads according to the effectiveness of 
the ideas suggested in doing good ; that 
is, in altering the point of view and con- 
duct of people so as to make them a better 
sympathetic environment. 

For instance, the children of your 
neighbours are likely to be the playmates 
of your own children, and the children of 
degenerate parents in the slum district 
of your city will possibly be the fellow- 
citizen partners of your own family. Again, 
when it is known that right or wrong nu- 
trition of the body is the most important 
agent in forming character, in establish- 
ing predisposition to temperance or intem- 
perance of living, including the desire for 
intoxicating stimulants, it is revealed to 
one that right nutrition of the community 
as a whole is an important factor in his 
own environment, as is self-care in the 
case of his own nourishment. 

The moment a student of every-day 
philosophy starts the study of problems 
from the A. B. C. beginning of things, 
and to shape his study according to an 



'Explanation of The A, B. C, Life Series 

A. B. C. sequence, each cause of inhar- 
mony is at once traced back to its first ex- 
pression in himself and then to causes 
influenced by his environments. 

If we find that the largest influences 
for good or bad originate with the right 
or wrong instruction of children during 
the home training or kindergarden period 
of their development, and that a dollar 
expended for education at that time is 
worth more for good than whole bancs 
of courts and whole armies of police to 
correct the effect of bad training and bad 
character later in life, it is quite logical 
to help promote the spread of the kinder- 
garden or the kindergarden idea to include 
all of the children born into the world, 
and to furnish mothers and kindergarden 
teachers with knowledge relative to the 
right nutrition of their wards which they 
can themselves understand and can teach 
effectively to children. 

If we also find that the influence of the 
kindergarden upon the parents of the in- 
fants is more potent than any other which 
can be brought to bear upon them, we see 



Explanation of The A. B. C. Life Series 

clearly that the way to secure the widest 
reform in the most thorough manner is 
to concentrate attention upon the kinder- 
garden phase of education, advocate its 
extension to include even the last one of 
the children, beginning with the most 
needy first, and extending the care out- 
ward from the centre of worst neglect to 
finally reach the whole. 

Experience in child saving so-called, 
and in child education on the kinder- 
garden principle, has taught the cheapest 
and the most profitable way to insure 
an environment of good neighbours and 
profit-earning citizens ; and investigation 
into the problem of human alimentation 
shows that a knowledge of the elements of 
an economic nutrition is the first essential 
of a family or school training ; and also 
that this is most impressive when taught 
during the first ten years of life. 

One cannot completely succeed in the 
study of menticulture from Its A. B. C. 
beginning and In A. B. C. sequence with- 
out appreciation of the interrelation of 
the physical and the mental, the personal 



Explanation of The A, B. C, Life Series 

and the social, in attaining a complete 
mastery of the subject. 

The author of the A. B. C. Life 
Series has pursued his study of the 
philosophy of life in experiences which 
have covered a great variety of occupa- 
tions in many different parts of the world 
and among peoples of many different 
nations and races. His first book, " Men- 
ticulture," dealt with purging the mind 
and habits of sundry weaknesses and de- 
terrents which have possession of people 
in general in some degree. He recog- 
nised the depressing effect of anger and 
worry and other phases of fearthought. 
In the book " Happiness," which followed 
next in order fear thought was shown to be 
the unprofitable element of forethought. 
The influence of environment on each 
individual was revealed as an important 
factor of happiness, or the reverse, by 
means of an accidental encounter with a 
neglected waif in the busy streets of 
Chicago during a period of intense 
national excitement incident to the war 
with Spain, and this led to the publication 

[/] 



'Explanation of The ^, B. C, Life Series 

of " That Last Waif ; or, Social Quaran- 
tine." During the time that this last 
book was being written, attention to the 
importance of right nutrition was invited 
by personal disabilities, and the experi- 
ments described in " Glutton or Epicure ; 
or, Economic Nutrition " were begun and 
have continued until now. 

In the study of the latter, but most 
important factor in profitable living, cir- 
cumstances have greatly favoured the 
author, as related in his latest book, 
" The A. B.-Z. of Our Own Nutrition." 

The almost phenomenal circulation of 
*' Menticulture " for a book of its kind, 
and a somewhat smaller interest in the 
books on nutrition and the appeal for 
better care of the waifs of society, showed 
that most persons wished, like the au- 
thor, to find a short cut to happiness by 
means of indifference to environment, 
both internal and external, while habitu- 
ally sinning against the physiological 
dietetic requirements of Nature. In smoth- 
ering worry and guarding against anger the 
psychic assistance of digestion was stimu- 



Explanation of The A, B, C. Life Series 

lated and some better results were thereby 
obtained, but not the best attainable 
results. 

Living is easy and life may be made 
constantly happy by beginning right; and 
the right beginning is none other than 
the careful feeding of the body. This 
done there is an enormous reserve of 
energy, a naturally optimistic train of 
thought, a charitable attitude towards 
everybody, and a loving appreciation of 
everything that God has made. Morbid- 
ity of temperament will disappear from an 
organism that is economically and rightly 
nourished, and death will cease to have 
any terrors for such ; and 2^^ fear of death 
is the worst depressant known, many of 
the worries of existence take their ever- 
lasting flight from the atmosphere of the 
rightly nourished. 

The wide interest now prevalent in 
the subjects treated in The A. B. C. Life 
Series is evidenced by the scientific, mili- 
tary, and lay activity in connection with 
the experiments at the Sheffield Scientific 
School of Yale University and elsewhere, 

[^] 



Explanation of The A, B, C, Life Series 

as related in the " A. B.-Z. of Our Own 
Nutrition " and in " The New Glutton or 
Epicure" of the series. 

The general application is more fully 
shown, however, by the indorsement of 
the great Battle Creek Sanitarium, which 
practically studies all phases of the sub- 
ject, from health conservation and child 
saving to general missionary work in 
social reform. 

HORACE FLETCHER. 



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